Ooh, what, we're talking about epistemology and science, my favorite subject? Why, yes, it turns out that all observation is an imposition onto the world, start

Ooh, what, we're talking about epistemology and science, my favorite subject? Why, yes, it turns out that all observation is an imposition onto the world, starting with our lyin' eyes, which can only see in a narrow band and don't even pick up UV. To some extent this is what "science" is - you create a new kind of instrument which you purport produces a specific kind of observation, you collect those observations and make claims about reality, summarily ignoring all of the ways your instrument leaks, breaks and fogs up. This is true whether the instrument is a Western blot (is your extraction reliable? Is your antibody specific? Did your gel break) or a microscope (is there out-of-plane light in your image? photo-bleaching? Are your fluorophores working?) or a thermometer in a bucket of sea-water (is your thermometer calibrated correctly? Is the water artificially warmed by your boat?). Et cetera. To some extent the ability to do science consists of saying, "Oh, this is good enough to go on," ignoring the bumps, and being mostly right about that.