As a retired natural sciences academic I agree in part. After all the twentieth century experienced a great upheaval as the classical formulas of Newton and his successors failed. But sometimes formulas do work and mostly do in scientific matters. But even there as that experience of the rise of quantum theory showed, they do not always. Feyerabend, a historian and philospher of science wrote a book " Against Method" which is a good exposition of the limitations of formulas in ordinary and extraordinary life.

I used to teach maths to mathematically deficient first year undergraduates in science at a U.K. university. I was taught at Reading School by C.E.Kemp the Headmaster, who like many of his generation in science and mathematics believed in going back to basics, to quote a recent political slogan. Although formulae are useful, their derivation is better! Kemp's little booklet on integration emphasized this, having methods of carrying out integrations: this booklet would have been better were it to have included such material. Perhaps my former colleague who failed to return my copy of Kemp will read this and send it to me! Where are you AJM: surely retired from the Scottish Agriculture department?!

The word electron for the unit of negative charge was proposed byu G.Johnson Stoney around 1860. Such a unit is implied by Faraday's Laws of Electrolysis, and further studies of electrolyte solutions e.g. by Arrhenius.