The Beginning of Infinity - By David Deutsch Page 0,19

a matter of theory. Very little in nature is detectable by unaided human senses. Most of what happens is too fast or too slow, too big or too small, or too remote, or hidden behind opaque barriers, or operates on principles too different from anything that influenced our evolution. But in some cases we can arrange for such phenomena to become perceptible, via scientific instruments.

We experience such instruments as bringing us closer to the reality – just as I felt while looking at that galactic cluster. But in purely physical terms they only ever separate us further from it. I could have looked up at the night sky in the direction of that cluster, and there would have been nothing between it and my eye but a few grams of air – but I would have seen nothing at all. I could have interposed a telescope, and then I might have seen it. In the event, I was interposing a telescope, a camera, a photographic development laboratory, another camera (to make copies of the plates), a truck to bring the plates to my university, and a microscope. I could see the cluster far better with all that equipment in the way.

Astronomers nowadays never look up at the sky (except perhaps in their spare time), and hardly ever look through telescopes. Many telescopes do not even have eyepieces suitable for a human eye. Many do not even detect visible light. Instead, instruments detect invisible signals which are then digitized, recorded, combined with others, and processed and analysed by computers. As a result, images may be produced – perhaps in ‘false colours’ to indicate radio waves or other radiation, or to display still more indirectly inferred attributes such as temperature or composition. In many cases, no image of the distant object is ever produced, only lists of numbers, or graphs and diagrams, and only the outcome of those processes affects the astronomers’ senses.

Every additional layer of physical separation requires further levels of theory to relate the resulting perceptions to reality. When the astronomer Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars (extremely dense stars that emit regular bursts of radio waves), this is what she was looking at:

Radio-telescope output from the first known pulsar

Only through a sophisticated chain of theoretical interpretation could she ‘see’, by looking at that shaky line of ink on paper, a powerful, pulsating object in deep space, and recognize that it was of a hitherto unknown type.

The better we come to understand phenomena remote from our everyday experience, the longer those chains of interpretation become, and every additional link necessitates more theory. A single unexpected or misunderstood phenomenon anywhere in the chain can, and often does, render the resulting sensory experience arbitrarily misleading. Yet, over time, the conclusions that science has drawn have become ever truer to reality. Its quest for good explanations corrects the errors, allows for the biases and misleading perspectives, and fills in the gaps. This is what we can achieve when, as Feynman said, we keep learning more about how not to fool ourselves.

Telescopes contain automatic tracking mechanisms that continuously realign them so as to compensate for the effect of the Earth’s motion; in some, computers continuously change the shape of the mirror so as to compensate for the shimmering of the Earth’s atmosphere. And so, observed through such a telescope, stars do not appear to twinkle or to move across the sky as they did to generations of observers in the past. Those things are only appearance – parochial error. They have nothing to do with the reality of stars. The primary function of the telescope’s optics is to reduce the illusion that the stars are few, faint, twinkling and moving. The same is true of every feature of the telescope, and of all other scientific instruments: each layer of indirectness, through its associated theory, corrects errors, illusions, misleading perspectives and gaps. Perhaps it is the mistaken empiricist ideal of ‘pure’, theory-free observation that makes it seem odd that truly accurate observation is always so hugely indirect. But the fact is that progress requires the application of ever more knowledge in advance of our observations.

So I was indeed looking at galaxies. Observing a galaxy via specks of silver is no different in that regard from observing a garden via images on a retina. In all cases, to say that we have genuinely observed any given thing is to say that we have accurately attributed our evidence (ultimately always evidence inside our own brains) to that thing. Scientific