[PHOTO] "What We're Really Looking at When We're Looking at Pluto"

[rfmcdonald]

At Wired, Jenna Garrett writes a great essay about photography and the nature of human perception starting from the New Horizons Pluto photos.

The images of Pluto that the New Horizons probe beamed across 3 billion miles of hard vacuum are, in a word, breathtaking. Towering mountains of ice, smooth plains, a wan alien landscape. They’re amazing not only for what they tell us about Pluto, but for instilling wonder at seeing something human beings have until now only imagined and speculated upon.

But did we really see Pluto?

The New Horizons mission wasn’t a hoax; human beings really did send a little robot all that way. Just as conspiracy theorists question the Apollo moon landings, some folks claim the Pluto flyby was fabricated. It wasn’t. New Horizons spent more than nine years crossing the solar system to glimpse Pluto, which really exists. And it sent back pictures. So that’s not what I mean.

What I mean is this: There is something between us and Pluto, aside from the vastness of space. Two sensors called LORRI and Ralph, mounted on New Horizons, are actually “seeing” Pluto. What we’re seeing are pictures. And whenever that’s the case, we should be deeply, philosophically skeptical about whether what we’re seeing has the meaning we’re imparting on it.

You might see an image and believe it is “true,” but it isn’t necessarily the truth. Every photograph’s meaning is limited by the technology that captured it, the technology that disseminated it, and people’s ability to understand what it is they’re seeing. The nagging question Is it real? plagues not just science, but philosophy and the arts as well. We can barely trust our eyes and brains.

Technology only makes the problem worse.