We tend to give the impression that we’ve figured almost everything out, and so you’re just learning the facts of it all.
Really, we’ve carved out a little island in a sea of ignorance, and the foundations of the island are just our current best rough approximations that might collapse.
An example from the field I’m in — biology. It’s quite likely that if you worked at it you can describe a new species in your backyard. You don’t have to go to the Amazon rainforest, there’s scientific unknowns all around you all the time.
We also have some grand principles that further unite the field, like the cell as the basic unit of organismal life, emergent properties of higher order systems, &c.
The remaining work is mostly 'stamp collecting' - looking at the details of the output of that algorithm. Of course those details are enormously complex. Kind of like mapping out the Mandlebrot Set after you already know the algorithm.
If you wanna cure cancer, resolve chronic diseases, conserve ecosystems under climate change, etc.
It’s cool to know that DNA exists and that life evolves by natural selection, but getting into the complex weeds of that fractal is where we discover that we know so little.