Yes and kind of. There was a group of theoretical Physic papers on how light works in the real world. These Papers where then applied to 3D graphic and is commonly referred to as Physically Based Render or PBR for short. Blender devs in response to this created Physically Based Shaders(PBS). All of these PBSes have the name Principle(Like BSDF, Hair, etc). So, if you want PBR results in eevee or cycles you need to us a principle shaders or create a very complex mixtures of the other shaders. The other shader nodes are from before the PBR workflow. They are also good for stylized and artistic materials.
