All science is materialistic

[Angrboda]

And the statement says NOTHING about matter being the only or fundamental reality. it talks about the composition of matter, but not whether or not matter is fundamental.

And, in fact, even defining matter is tricky. Is light matter? Are neutrinos? They are certainly *physical*, but I think very few scientists would say that light is matter or material. I have even seen a "definition" of matter as that which is made up of first generation fermions (up and down quarks and electrons).

The essence of science is the scientific method: to test all ideas via observation, to only consider ideas that are testable (usually falsifiable) and to agree to modify or eliminate those ideas that are shown wrong via observation.

Nothing in this method *requires* 'matter' or even 'physical' aspects to be fundamental.

As you and everyone else knows, by Einstein's very famous formula,


one has the mass–energy equivalence, and so, massless particles, such as photons, would have zero invariant mass.  Materialism would certainly encompass the notion of fields (of course, the basis of QFT), where at very high energies a field would produce a particle (e.g., the Higgs boson).

Matter and mass are not equivalent terms.