No, that sounds more like a (very distorted) description of regularization and/or renormalization.
Regularization techniques take effective field theories like the Standard Model, which are known to be inaccurate at high enough energies, and isolate their low-energy behavior.
For example: classical electrodynamics, interpreted naively, says that the total energy stored in an electron's electric field is infinite, since the field strength blows up to infinity at the position of the electron itself. As this isn't actually true, we know there must be physics going on very close to the electron that our theory doesn't account for. But even if our theory isn't the Final Truth, it's still capable of making perfectly good predictions far away from the electron, and we can't just sit around waiting for quantum mechanics to be discovered.
So we make the structure of the electron a parameter of our theory: it can't tell you what the force between two electrons is, but if you posit that the electron's charge is distributed like so, it can tell you what the force between two electrons would be.
We then use empirical data to reabsorb our new degree of freedom: this is renormalization. Instead of trying to predict the force between two electrons, we measure it, and then work backwards to figure out what the electron's charge distribution would have to look like to produce that force. In this particular case: the electron behaves as if it were a sphere about 10^-15 meters across. This is of course not the actual structure of the electron, but it reproduces the same low-energy classical physics.
> We then use empirical data to reabsorb our new degree of freedom: this is renormalization
Notably, in a less rigorous field, this process would be called "doing science to determine physical properties of things", which most people consider an acceptable pastime for physicists. As it turns out we can be pretty confident that the "experimental evidence" is bunk and there's something going on the theory can't account for, but it's funny that so many of the Monday morning quantum physicists think all this math stuff is just confusing the issue and pure, blind empiricism is the way to go.
Regularization techniques take effective field theories like the Standard Model, which are known to be inaccurate at high enough energies, and isolate their low-energy behavior.
For example: classical electrodynamics, interpreted naively, says that the total energy stored in an electron's electric field is infinite, since the field strength blows up to infinity at the position of the electron itself. As this isn't actually true, we know there must be physics going on very close to the electron that our theory doesn't account for. But even if our theory isn't the Final Truth, it's still capable of making perfectly good predictions far away from the electron, and we can't just sit around waiting for quantum mechanics to be discovered.
So we make the structure of the electron a parameter of our theory: it can't tell you what the force between two electrons is, but if you posit that the electron's charge is distributed like so, it can tell you what the force between two electrons would be.
We then use empirical data to reabsorb our new degree of freedom: this is renormalization. Instead of trying to predict the force between two electrons, we measure it, and then work backwards to figure out what the electron's charge distribution would have to look like to produce that force. In this particular case: the electron behaves as if it were a sphere about 10^-15 meters across. This is of course not the actual structure of the electron, but it reproduces the same low-energy classical physics.