…“epistemic things” are what one does not yet know, things contained within the arrangements of technical conditions in the experimental system. Experimental systems are thus the material, functional units of knowledge production; they co-generate experimental phenomena and the corresponding concepts embodied in those phenomena. In this sense, experimental systems are techno-epistemic processes that bring conceptual and phenomenal entities— epistemic things— into being. Epistemic things themselves are situated at the interface, as it were, between the material and conceptual aspects of science.

– Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth-Century Histories of Life

The notion that what ones does not yet know is of more import than what one does know is counterintuitive to a point. The idea the experimental system and the technical conditions within which it is framed produce and co-generate these finite concrete conceptual and phenomenal entities – “epistemic things” through the “techno-epistemic” processes of the experiment itself is amazing if true…