Subjectivity, in Physical Terms

I thought of something rather interesting last night as I was ruminating on cosmology, quantum mechanics and our general place in the world. It suddenly struck me that the methods used to observe and understand these two realms of the universe - the micro and macro - can give us a fundamental insight into the nature of the Subject. 

All of our knowledge of the physical universe beyond our planet is accumulated through passivity - in other words, we lie in wait for astronomical phenomena (almost exclusively in the form of electromagnetic radiation) to affect us. On the other hand, our knowledge of the micro realm (and this especially in physics) comes about through our manipulation of the object which is being studied: particle accelerators, chemical combinations and the famous "two-slit experiment" are all examples of this method. 

What this illustrates is the Subject's essentially twofold means of acquiring knowledge about the world: he is either passively or actively accumulating data, and his methodology depends upon whether the data corresponds to something larger or smaller than himself. And while I didn't enter into this train of though with any indication that it might pertain to the moral realm, does it not insinuate that the "will to power" is at work in the field of epistemology..?