I truly understand your point and must admit that i think the same for some of your statements, but i think you took it too much as an obvious statement he made and not just a warning. The ''Man-with-a-hammer syndrome'' sounds like it actually apply for people wich have the common bad reflexe on applying something on everything and making it work. That's how i understand ''to the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail.'', no matter if it's an internationnal war or a problem between a dad and his child who don't want to eat dinner, they reduce it to a simple reason that could resolve everything if we could remove it (I think we can agree that there's an edge between those two). For me, Shalmanese just warned us to prevent getting to that point where we just get to much into it.

And about that point you made on physics, quantum is one of the biggest example. Too many person took it as the ultimate law, and people like Heinsenberg, pure genius, even said that nothing could overpass it and today, there's so many people finding problem with it. I won't get too much into this topic, not the point here, just saying that you probably took it too much as an official law he made against ''bright idea you got that explain a lot'' and didn't separate two different thing as the one you state and the one he did.

(Sorry if you can't understand everything, i'm french and don't have that much time to do a proper explanation of my idea)