For six years, I worked at a media research institute. Not as a researcher, but in the “science communication” department – roughly speaking, the press office. One of my responsibilities was producing the institute’s own podcast. Once a month, I spoke to journalism researchers, media lawyers or media sociologists about their work. Sometimes we discussed the findings of a brand-new study, sometimes broader questions about current social issues. “What is social media doing to our children?”, “What does the future of public service broadcasting look like?”, “How can we hold major online platforms accountable for the content posted on them?”

In these conversations, I often got the answer:
“We don’t know.”
Or: “We don’t know yet.”
Or: “That question will have to be answered by further research.”

The more we know, it seemed, the more we also know about what we don’t know. Science is the sword with which we cut off the head of the Hydra, that mythical monster, only to discover moments later that two new heads have grown in its place.

And even when we do know something, sometimes we only know it under certain conditions, and only until someone proves the opposite. Science is the arduous, labyrinthine path towards truth. We follow it in small steps, sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards. A path that demands a great deal of patience. The danger lies in impatience. The longing for simple solutions feeds the certainty, in some people, that they already know everything. Beware of those who think they know it all!

Johanna Sebauer is an Austrian author. She studied political science in Vienna and journalism in Aarhus, Denmark, Santiago de Chile and Hamburg. For six years, she worked in science communication at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research in Hamburg, where she also hosted the BredowCast podcast. Her second novel, Pompón, was published by DuMont in autumn 2026.