The extent of Human Knowledge!?

So...last night I was studying for this big test I have on Monday

And I'm looking at diagrams used in the lecture slides...and diagrams in the text book...and they seem to be in conflict. They have different names for what appears to me to be the same thing...and the flow charts seem to disagree on how many steps there should be between point A and B, whether A branches off from B or from C....etc.

So I emailed my professor to ask what I should be taking as the "final authority" and is it even important in this case to know that level of detail and the answer he gave me was the exact answer I was hoping for- just focus on this and ignore that because we haven't really worked out how it actually happens yet.

Which brings me to the actual point of this thought train I'm having.

I'm learning stuff that is actually the extent of human knowledge in this field.

In high school bio, they'd be like "yeah...this is glycolysis" and they would draw a circle, and say "but you don't have to know anything except that it breaks down glucose and gives you energy"

We didn't have to know that because it was too complicated for the scope of the class.

Now, the things we don't have to know have nothing to do with being too complicated- in biochem we will have to draw out the whole process of glycolysis and know the craziest amount of detail about it, for sure.

But now, the things we don't have to know are because NOBODY knows them.

And that is really strange!

My whole life I've taken for granted the fact that we just know these things. My older professors will tell me about how when they studied this stuff we didn't know this, this, and this, which seem so basic to understanding biology to me. But really, there's a lot of stuff recently discovered, and there's a lot of stuff yet to be discovered. So it's really weird being in a class and having a professor of cell biology from a medical school tell you "you don't really have to know this, because nobody really knows how it works. People are working on figuring it out." Crazy. But Awesome.