Speaking for myself, as a layman, I had always been walking around thinking of hadrons as balls with other balls inside, with forces mediated by tiny/insubstant

Speaking for myself, as a layman, I had always been walking around thinking of hadrons as balls with other balls inside, with forces mediated by tiny/insubstantial yet-to-be-discovered balls. Yes, I knew they weren't balls, exactly, but still. Newer models with greater sensitivity have sort of pulled a fast one: that maybe the balls are a side effect of the way we look at them. More precisely, to look at them, we need to smack them hella hard, to make the balls come out where we can see them. But the smacking might be a part of why the balls look like balls! The native hadron in its natural habitat might be something fantastically more complex, a sort of cell biology of energies all competing and vibrating, and they're part of the interrelated forces of the nucleus itself - we might even use that obsolete term return, the "nucleon", to represent this complex. Jiving against all of this are new ideas about what mass actually is, defining spatial attributes as degrees of freedom, and all sorts of new thoughts. It's super exciting. So that's what I mean by "shocked how little we know", because what we did think we knew got oversold as a World of Balls. But who knows?! Maybe this neat laser thing can help find more answers.