All the Fancy Measuring Devices Used in Science Rely on Two Stone-Age Techniques
Humans are animals that measure things. Call us Homo mensura. We have a compulsion to quantify, and for millennia we’ve been inventing new ways to go about it. For anything you can think of, there’s a device to measure it—from sphygmomanometers to spectrophotofluorometers. And of course nowhere is this more true than in science. Well, science and baseball.
Physicists build models to explain how the world works. It might be an equation, like the ideal gas law: PV = nRT. This tells us, for example, that if you double the temperature (T) of a gas, all else equal, its gas pressure (P) will double. But to see if the model is legit, or at least useful, we need to get some real-world values and check whether the equation holds. Modeling and measuring, measuring and modeling—that’s science in a nutshell.
Of course, today we have some pretty fancy instruments for this....
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