The Challenge and Necessity of a Shared Reality

All animals, including humans, have limitations in how they find out about the world. And we humans invent instrumentation to correct for weaknesses in our perceptions of the world. The most basic weakness we have is that our perceptions don’t tell us everything about what’s going on with the world. So we need corrective devices. Some of us need spectacles. To see very distant things, like distant galaxies or planets, we use telescopes; to see very small things, like cells, we use microscopes. It’s hard for many of us to hear the difference between a single tone and a chord, so sound analyzers let us break down complex sounds into their constituents, in a way most of us couldn’t do unaided. We usually see daylight as undifferentiated white light: it takes the prisms to let us analyze the complexity of daylight, to see that it is made up of rays of different colors. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But the acceptance of the instruments we use in analyzing our surroundings is hard-​won. Consider electricity. To find out about electrical currents, we use various measuring instruments—voltmeters, ammeters, and so on. These instruments tend to be familiar, so nowadays we take it for granted that the instrument does what it says on the tin. “It says ‘voltmeter,’ so I guess it’s measuring volts,” we say. But this raises a tricky puzzle about instruments: Since each instrument represents our best a...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized freelance Source Type: news