What is the connection between science, scientific theories, experiments, and the phenomenal reality, the universe, the "world" in which we find ourselves?

My epiphany about the fact that the relationship between science and phenomenal reality is not a shared concept at all, dates back to many years ago.

During a train journey I talked to a friend who was an engineer about a thesis that my sister was writing for her degree in mathematics, about the study of a mathematical model of the heartbeat.

My interlocutor said: "It is incredible how the heart follows a precise mathematical model in its movements!"

There I realized how the relationship between science, scientific theories and phenomenal reality was not at all clear to a person of culture, intelligent and prepared.

Many people think that science is the explanation of reality.

Others even come to scientism, that is, to believe that science is reality and is truth.

What is science instead?

By science we mean a set of theories and related experiments that can invalidate them (experiments never prove a theory, they can only invalidate it) that aim to simplify the phenomenal reality to the point of being formalizable through rules and concepts understandable to the human mind.

A theory does not explain reality, nor is it reality.

The heart does not follow any mathematical model, it just beats.

There are mathematical models that are more or less compatible with the real heart rate. They do not explain it, they can, more or less often, predict it, in no case are they a heartbeat.

When we talk about epistemology, gnoseology, theory of knowledge we refer to the goodness in itself of the method used in the scientific field, we don't talk about the fact that science leads to a certain knowledge of reality, but how much it adheres to certain criteria that make it correct within it, not as an exact definition of reality.

Mathematics and geometry, for example, are exact sciences in that, within them, they perfectly describe their universe.

But they are not a description of our universe, in our universe there are no perfect circles, parallel lines, etc. etc.

There are very similar things that can be made out of a perfect circle, but the circle is a theoretical abstraction, not a phenomenal reality.

Immense damage, for example, derives from this misunderstanding in the use of statistics and probability calculations, which are descriptions of the ideal universe that postulate and have nothing to do with our universe.

The classic example is that of the dice, if a real dice after 1000 throws, has presented 1000 times the number 1, the probability that it comes out 1 at the next throw is very close to certainty, because that dice, evidently, is NOT the theoretical equiprobable dice hypothesized in the theory of probabilities, but a simple real dice which, evidently, tends to always present the face with the one above.

Most people do not grasp the fact that considering science as the explanation of reality is an absurdity implicit in the concept of science: science is by its very definition in perpetual evolution.

What for the scientists of 100 years ago was "the best theory" about a certain phenomenon today would probably arouse the hilarity of contemporary scientists and the same will happen to those of the next century with our current "best theories".

Something that evolves, sometimes even with a total paradigm shift, how can be the absolute truth?

This fideistic and absolutist attitude towards science is the most antiscientific one can imagine: what sense would science itself have if today's scientific theories were already capable of fully explaining reality and were, therefore, absolute truths?

The crucial point to understand is that science is not, nor does it claim to be, nor will it ever be able to understand or explain reality, which in itself is holistic and therefore incomprehensible to a finite mind like the human one.

What science is trying to do is to create theories that come as close as possible to simplify the reality that can be within the reach of our brain, which reasons in a simplified and rational way, that is, has a reductionist approach.