Measurement Quotes

“It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to 'show' it to me because as soon as I saw it my future would change by definition. This is why Werner Heisenberg's adaptation of the Hays Office—the so-called principle of uncertainty whereby the act of measuring something has the effect of altering the measurement—is of such importance. In my case the difference is often made by publicity. For example, and to boast of one of my few virtues, I used to derive pleasure from giving my time to bright young people who showed promise as writers and who asked for my help. Then some profile of me quoted someone who disclosed that I liked to do this. Then it became something widely said of me, whereupon it became almost impossible for me to go on doing it, because I started to receive far more requests than I could respond to, let alone satisfy. Perception modifies reality: when I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth.
Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.

[Epitaph he composed for himself a few months before he died]”
― Johannes Kepler

“Judgmental heart has lack of introspection.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Judging others is just wasting your time,
giving your advice to men who don't pay.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Buffett found it 'extraordinary' that academics studied such things. They studied what was measurable, rather than what was meaningful. 'As a friend [Charlie Munger] said, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
― Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

“One of the most common reasons for a product failure is poor audience research.”
― Pooja Agnihotri, 17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure

“Organizational structure and management style are those two factors that we always forget to analyze when the performance of our businesses goes down.”
― Pooja Agnihotri, 17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure

“Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“Science uses the Red Shift to measure deep cosmic distances. But how to measure deep historic time? How about—the Saffron Shift.

If history itself had a color, it is . . . like wood or bark, or living forest floor.

Assigning hues to time periods, the sum total of history is saffron-brown—but the chromatic arc starts from blinding white (prehistory) to sun-yellow (Ancient Greece), then deepening to pale wood tones (Dark Ages) and finally exploding like an infinite chord into a full brown palette that includes mahoganies, siennas (Middle Ages), oak, sandalwood (the Renaissance), cherry, maple (Age of Reason), and near-black old woods (Industrial Revolution) for which there may not be names.

As time approaches our own, the wood-brown palette fades to a weird glassy colorlessness, goes black-and-white for a brief span as you think of photographs of your grandparents, and then again fades until we get a clear medium that is the color of the world.

And the present moment is perfectly transparent.

It's only as you start looking into the future, that the colors start returning. The glass is turning silvery with a murky haze, and there is blue somewhere in the distance . . .”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“For millenia, scientists always try to measure
the size of this vast universe. One way to know
that is first to find the smallest single thing that
constructs this universe. When they get it, the
real measurement of universe can be understood for sure.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Everything that seems strange about quantum mechanics comes down to measurement. If we take a look, the quantum system behaves one way. If we don’t, the system does something else. What’s more, different ways of looking can elicit apparently mutually contradictory answers. If we look at a system one way, we see this; but if we look at the same system another way, we see not merely that but not this. The object went through one slit; no, it went through both. How can that be? How can ‘the way nature behaves’ depend on how – or if – we choose to observe it?”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“We know that measurements of a quantum system seem to collapse the wavefunction. We most certainly don’t know how, or why, or indeed if that actually happens.”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“[T]he probabilistic nature of the Schrödinger equation, which predicts only the likelihood of different experimental outcomes, leaves it offering no reason why one specific outcome is observed instead of another. In effect, it says that quantum events (the radioactive decay of an atom, say) happen for no reason.”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“Einstein and his colleagues made the perfectly reasonable assumption of locality: that the properties of a particle are localized on that particle, and what happens here can’t affect what happens there without some way of transmitting the effects across the intervening space. It seems so self-evident that it hardly appears to be an assumption at all. But this locality is just what quantum entanglement undermines – which is why ‘spooky action at a distance’ is precisely the wrong way to look at it. We can’t regard particle A and particle B in the EPR experiment as separate entities, even though they are separated in space. As far as quantum mechanics is concerned, entanglement makes them both parts of a single object. Or to put it another way, the spin of particle A is not located solely on A in the way that the redness of a cricket ball is located on the cricket ball. In quantum mechanics, properties can be non-local. Only if we accept Einstein’s assumption of locality do we need to tell the story in terms of a measurement on particle A ‘influencing’ the spin of particle B. Quantum non-locality is the alternative to that view.”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“Men have invented various names in which to measure distance, and have a certain pleasure in assigning units of one to the other, it is the sense that so many inches toi the spans, and so many spans to the league; in the sense that a league in the Sorannah is almost two leagues within the ancient confines of Seawall, that is, within the barony that once held the city of Dragaera, and, at the time of which we have the honor to write, still held a portion of it; yet. for all of this measurement, it is understood by those who travel and by those who listen to travelers that the meaningful unit by which distance can be measured is time.”
― Steven Brust, The Phoenix Guards

“The measure of who you are will always exceed measurement.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Silence is sound that cannot be measured.”
― Paul Bamikole, Trees by the river

“Quantum objects may in principle have a number of observable properties, but we can’t gather them all (Copenhagenists might in fact say ‘elicit them’) in a single go, because they can’t all exist at once. And by gathering some we may scramble the values of others.”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“Here is the answer to Einstein’s question about the moon. Yes, it is there when no one observes it – because the environment is already, and without cease, ‘measuring’ it. All of the photons of sunlight that bounce off the moon are agents of decoherence, and more than adequate to fix its position in space and give it a sharp outline. The universe is always looking.”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“Don't you ever imagine?"
"What's the imagination got to do with anything?"
"It's better than your ever increasing accuracies. They're as phoney as silicon boobs. Like proper tits, inaccuracies are much more entertaining.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Your success isn't measured by the amount of approvals you get, but the denials you give to your failures pit.”
― Goitsemang Mvula

“The law is, at most times, the best measure of our limitations.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“The customary units of measurement?

They have practical applications,
but learning them is mostly done through rote memorization—

There aren’t any proofs or critical evaluations regarding
REASONS why a foot equals twelve inches

There are only facts to memorize,
but not puzzles to solve,

With algebra—YES!

There isn’t just memorization—

There is the rearrangement
of jigsaw pieces—
jigsaw pieces that
you can solve,
not just memorize!”
― Lucy Carter, For the Intellect

“Occasionally, the “eyeball” approach to measurement is both imprecise and truly problematic, though we might not know that until it’s too late.”
― Christopher Manske, Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS

“Size is not the proper way to measure a pair of boxing gloves. A boxing glove is measured by weight.”
― Christopher Manske, Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS

“English: "Who cannot be understood cannot be controlled."

Česky: „Koho nelze pochopit, toho nelze ovládat.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“Maturity cannot be measured by height or age, think ahead!”
― Luckson T Mabade

“Como la luna en el budismo, una partícula no existe; el acto de medición la vuelve un objeto real”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World