I think this is a terrible misconception which I had as well in childhood (a MSc in physics cured me of that - I'm mostly as dumb and ignorant as without the degree sans some tiny areas of knowledge).
Maybe this misconception is caused by the popular faith in 'expertise' and the fact that only well understood phenomena make good news articles and popular science programs.
It's important to popularize current state of knowlegde but it also causes a fake perception of god like understanding of the world when in fact - what the human species has achieved through science is remarkable - but so very far from 'total knowledge'.
The daily question science asks are becoming more intricate, but we are as far from 'total knowledge' as ever, I think. We just see the rabbit hole going deeper and deeper. And it's fun!
Around 1800 or so, you could order a box of insects from the colonies, spend time carefully describing each, publish, and in so doing, with comparatively minimal effort, be a scientist. But the low-hanging fruit has largely been picked now, and for non-scientists, the barrier to joining in, to contribute something meaningful, is so much higher now that it may appear that everything is now known. Indeed, the things that are not known are so far outside the realm of everyday experience that non-scientists aren't even aware of the questions anymore.
Interestingly, some companies have programs that let you experience being a 'citizen scientist' for yourself. As one example I'm aware of, https://taxonexpeditions.com/
One doesn't have to be a professional anthropologist to see that since some time in the 19th century “science” became a popular set of religious beliefs that explain the world to a commoner, thanks to mass education. Semi-jokingly, the watershed was when charlatans started promoting snake oils using scientific language. The spherical Universal Observer in a vacuum, which is understood (at least by some scientists) to be an idealized part of the imaginary model cleaned from the impurities of reality, is considered a possibility, a goal, a metaphor of “all human knowledge combined” in that trivialized belief.
Various faces of scientism have been criticized in various ways for all that time, from obvious examples in Dostoevsky novels to hardcore philosophical papers.
I think this is a terrible misconception which I had as well in childhood (a MSc in physics cured me of that - I'm mostly as dumb and ignorant as without the degree sans some tiny areas of knowledge).
Maybe this misconception is caused by the popular faith in 'expertise' and the fact that only well understood phenomena make good news articles and popular science programs.
It's important to popularize current state of knowlegde but it also causes a fake perception of god like understanding of the world when in fact - what the human species has achieved through science is remarkable - but so very far from 'total knowledge'.
The daily question science asks are becoming more intricate, but we are as far from 'total knowledge' as ever, I think. We just see the rabbit hole going deeper and deeper. And it's fun!