I realized this in 1993 when I talked with a University of Kansas physicist, John Ralston. That was the year I found out that I'd been dead wrong about the electron. I thought electrons were little balls spinning around the nucleus of the atom much as planets circle the sun. No way, said Ralston. They even wobble a bit as they spin.
Trouble is, physicists are always changing their tune.
Back in the 1980s, I heard about string theory. The basic building blocks of the universe, the theory said, were tiny wiggling strings. They existed not in a three-dimensional universe, but in one consisting either of 10 dimensions or of 26. Many of these extra dimensions, it was said, were extremely tiny and curled up. The idea is that there are only five or six dimensions, and the extra ones aren't as preposterously small as those that turn up in string theory.