How does your dismissal of philosophy jibe with your reference to a 'philosophy of science'?

I'm not dismissing it. I'm saying most of it doesn't apply to physics. Philosophy of Science actually does because it makes you realize that assumptions are being made, even in the rigor of science. How do you know that 1 second today is the same as 1 second last week? You can't lay them next to each other and compare. How can we know the same math/laws work in the realm of quasars as they do on Earth? It wasn't philosophy like Sartre or Rousseau (meaning of existence). Physics doesn't do meaning. Science doesn't do meaning. Philosophers take some elements of science and try to get meaning from it, or -worse- try to discard it because the implications don't agree with their established "meaning" (often religion).

A quibble: I don't think physicists believe vacuum fluctuations result in quarks. As I recall, they are most commonly electron/positron pairs, and sometimes photons.

Protons have never been observed to disintegrate in countless studies of this seemingly aged universe, despite their underlying composition as three ephemerally flickering quarks.

That's because their estimated half-life is 10^34 years. And it "decays", not "disintegrates". A decay results in different particles (photons, neutrinos, etc). Given the universe is only 10^10 years old, it would be amazing if we saw one anywhere in the entire universe. To my knowledge, the three quarks of the proton do not "flicker".

The flowery talk seems to appeal to some people, but science is much more down to Earth. About the furthest they go is "we are made of star stuff" (Sagan). We talk about probabilities, behaviors, empirical results, reproducibility, falsifiability, theories (the strict science kind, not the sloppy vernacular most people use), and often a lot of math. We're kinda boring people, really. Sticklers for details and precision, and expecting everyone to show their work.