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

The surface of our sun is a wild, violent place and now we can see it in exquisite detail, thanks to the first images returned by the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope based in Hawaii.

"Using visible wavelengths of light, it is difficult to tell if an asteroid is big and dark, or bright and small, because both combinations reflect the same amount of light," said Carrie Nugent, a NEOWISE scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. "But when you look at an asteroid in the infrared with NEOWISE, the amount of infrared light corresponds with how big the asteroid is, and with some thermal models on a computer, you can figure out how big the asteroids are."

Have we forgotten how to look up?