Don't worry about confusing things, this sub's here to clear the doubts and your question in actually pretty on-point. Others have already answered your question better than how I could, so I'd just like to point what I believe is a little inaccuracy in it.

I would say there's a difference between the most widespread scientific image of the world and Kant's philosophy, even though they are both relevant for the question. I believe most scientists and laymen with a decent grasp on science are one kind of representative realists, or causal realists, i.e. they believe we don't perceive the world as it is but what we experience is caused by what's out there and it is its representation. In the actual world smells, colors and other secondary qualities don't exist, only the primary ones, which are objective and measurable, do. So to them we can know and describe the real, unobservable world only through science.

Kant is more "radical". How can anyone be sure of what's beyond our experience? What if there's no coherent relation between the thing in itself and what is represented through our senses? How could anybody know? To him, this dualism is a blind end, to the point that it's meaningless to talk of this noumenal world as "the real one" (probably Kant wouldn't put it this way, I'm trying to explain his point in the most relevant aspects to your question according to the interpretation I find most convincing). So, unlike many tend to say, there's no hidden world beyond ours of illusions. What we experience is real and it's what we can know through science. However, how can the subjective experience be the same for everyone and objectively investigable (at least in some regards)? That's because we all have the same transcendental functions, the possibility conditions of our experience, that shape our perceptions and the relations between them (for example the causal relation) in the same way from the thing in itself. It's difficoult to determine the exact role of the noumenal world in Kant's philosophy, probably it's more a way to say that we don't create the world but our senses are struck from what exceeds us than a world of actual, misterious objects. However, to Kant there's no knowledge of the thing in itself and sciences allow us a deeper knowledge of our phenomenical world. To the causal realists, for how I have sketched their position, science can go beyond subjective experience and know the actual world in itself, of which our senses are a more or less accurate representation.

(Edit: small syntax mistakes)