hehe I say 'real' in contrast to TA.
I don't feel comfortable considering myself a scientist or a guru, but I have learned in my research that the apparent building block of the universe, the atom, is made up of empty space, with a center of bursting energy (which itself pops in and out of existence unpredictably). Now tell me how balls of empty space manifests into solid matter? And that's where you're right about us not knowing everything.
It's as if when you move your hand in front of your face the atoms that were just before made up of chemicals mingling in the air and dust particles have all of a sudden been reprogramed to become your hand by the use of your own intent. Ponder that for a while!
I'm no expert so here's a very relevant documentary:
The illusion of reality
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1406370011028154810&q=atom&total=34132&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=7
Where you are making the mistake is in dropping the context of 2 statements that like any other statement, lose their status of being facts due to being out of context.
FYI, I've done years and years of study - Environmental Engineering and Molecular Biology specifically, but I was greatly interested in Physics in my earlier years and read up a whole lot of it, not to mention studied it as part of the Engineering course anyway. So I'm not one of those people who've done nothing more than seen a few you tube videos of 'experts' claiming that nothing is real because at the sub-atomic level, energy and matter seem to lose their distinct identities (and hence properties) and more or less become interchangeable or exhibit dual behavior (where one state contradicts the other).
Where do I start? For one, all that means is that we need to learn and technologically advance a lot more to be able to study such things and arrive at conclusions that make sense. The fact that there is a lot of space between sub-atomic particles doesn't mean that solid matter is an illusion - the quantity of an entity doesn't always decide the outcome. To give you an example, the human body is 70% plus water. Does that mean you can say, "We are all mostly water anyway, so I may as well give up on trying to score with a female. I'll just drink a bottle of water when I get horny because 'essentially', it's just an interaction between 2 bags of fluid'?
BTW, those 2 bags of fluid I'm talking about are you and the water bottle, not your nuts
Take a million zeros and add them up - you'll still get zero for an answer. But throw a number before the zeros and see what it turns into. It's the same thing with everything else - the factor that decides the outcome of an event or the part that gives an entity it's meaning maybe trivial in size or quantity in relation to the overall. Doesn't mean it can be ignored just because it's not the dominating constituent.
