another way to put this is um that if you think about using a telescope an example that alan offered us a little while ago to examine celestial objects as indeed did 00:20:37 galileo you can only interpret the output of that telescope the things you see in the telescope correctly if we actually know how it works that's really obviously true about 00:20:48 things like radio telescopes and infrared telescopes but it's true of optical telescopes as well as paul fire opened emphasized if you don't have a theory of optics then when you aim your telescope at jupiter and look at the 00:21:00 moons all you see are bits of light on a piece of glass you need to believe to know how the telescope works in order to understand those as moons orbiting a planet 00:21:12 so to put it crudely if we don't know how the instrument that we're using uh if we don't know how the instrument that we're using to mediate our access to the world works if we don't understand it we don't know whether we're looking through 00:21:24 a great telescope or a kaleidoscope and we don't know whether we're using a pre a properly constructed radio telescope or just playing a fantasy video game