Nobody has ever seen an electron

After having recalled the recent discovery of the Higgs boson and indicated the different particles of the standard model of particle physics, the author notices that, even though some of their characteristics can be measured, we don't know much about their nature, their shape. Some of them have a long enough life duration to leave some visible traces in a detector like the LHC. Some don't. Recent experiments seemed to prove that an electron is round. Thus, if the mathematical predictions of the standard model have been very precisely confirmed by experiments (and this seems to confirm the validity of the model), nobody can say he actually saw a particle. This raises the question of the relationship between equations and reality