What nobody told you about science

I have some unsettling news for you: Unless you pursued an advanced career in science, chances are that your conception about what science actually knows or doesn’t know is profoundly wrong. To put it short: people tend to believe that science has figured out things that it really hasn’t yet. And I’m not talking about unimportant details of complex theories, I’m talking about the essence of what things really are.

So if you think that you know that matter is composed of atoms, and that those atoms consist of a series of negative charged electrons orbiting around a positively charged nucleus, think again. This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s not that they intentionally hid the information from the population. Information is out there. But non-scientists rarely find it (or understand it) and it’s not taught in schools. But the truth is that in the current state of science we don’t know (humans in general don’t know) how an atom really looks like, or what an atom really is. They made you think that they knew it because they figured out a model that works pretty well to describe and predict everything that is useful in a human scale, for practical purposes. But if you dig deeper into the ontology of matter you will find out that no one has ever been able to directly observe subatomic particles, and that the current model actually doesn’t describe reality in a more general way.