Don't let your tools get in the way of thinking about information
The challenge for the scientist, particularly in the era of Big Science, is to keep the instrument in its place.
The best scientific kit comes from thinking about how to solve a problem.
But once it becomes a part of the standard repertoire and acquires a lumbering momentum of its own, it might start to constrain thinking more than it assists it.
As the historians of science Albert van Helden and Thomas Hankins said in 1994: ‘Because instruments determine what can be done, they also determine to some extent what can be thought.’
