Good Fortune

I picked up a couple of pieces of paper off the ground today, and they happened to be someone's discarded fortune cookie fortunes. One of them went as follows: "Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see." My first reaction was to think this was a philosophical statement, a la Plato's idea that all, e.g., tables are shadows of the Ideal table. This cookie statement also applies to what we do at the lab, though!
We observe visual output (on a computer or oscilloscope) produced by electrical signals which are generated by the interactions with various detector materials of the actual objects which we're studying. Even when visible light is produced by the interaction of projectiles with scintillating material, we either look at this light as an electronic signal or via a camera transmitting its images over long cables to television screens (the camera is used because it would be ridiculously unsafe to stand there during an experiment and look at the scintillation light in person). We don't directly see what we're looking at because we can't. Nobody can stare at a target being bombarded with beam particles and watch the gamma rays come flying out or see an individual nucleus. These things are way too small to see, so we have to rely on seeing the effects they leave on the materials around them. It's an interesting situation that modern science is lucky enough to be in; in the olden days when cutting-edge science was rolling balls down slopes or observing collisions of macroscopic objects, experimental information was clearly visible and could be garnered just by staring at stuff. As science has progressed through understanding the rough picture to investigating the finer details, it's gotten to the point where the things most scientists study are either so subtle or so small that they can't be discerned directly by the human senses. This raises an important concern, namely that understanding the results you see at the display end of your Great Machine of Science can't tell you reliably about the object of your study without detailed knowledge of how your Great Machine works. This is why it's very important to do precise calibrations and characterizations of your equipment so that you can disentangle the effects on your observations due to characteristics of the object of study and the effects due to characteristics of your equipment. Speaking of which, I need to go fix my efficiency calibration.