ABSTRACT
Modern science is critically dependent upon technology, and scientific progress almost invariably demands an escalation in the technological state of the art—for natural science is fundamentally empirical, with its advance dependent not on human ingenuity alone but on the monitoring observations to which we can gain access only through interactions with nature. The days are long past when useful scientific data can be had by unaided sensory observation of the ordinary course of nature. Artifice has become an indispensable route to the acquisition and processing of scientifically useful data. The sorts of data on which scientific discovery nowadays depends can be generated by technological means only.
