Precision Measurement Quotes

Oh, the difference between nearly right and exactly right.

Accurate and minute measurement seems to the non-scientific imagination, a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient long-continued labour in the minute sifting of numerical results.

One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.

Done right, precision can help clarify, plus it's fun.

In a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.

Be precise. A lack of precision is dangerous when the margin of error is small.

Not an inch!!!

Master Precision. Be a precision instrument myself.

Experimental work of great refinement is necessary in order to determine atomic weights. No relationships between them have yet been certainly found which make it possible for us to compute by any sort of calculation exactly the value of any one atomic weight from any other.

For the better part of my last semester at Garden City High, I constructed a physical pendulum and used it to make a "precision" measurement of gravity. The years of experience building things taught me skills that were directly applicable to the construction of the pendulum. Twenty-five years later, I was to develop a refined version of this measurement using laser-cooled atoms in an atomic fountain interferometer.

The most exciting science requires the most complex instruments.

We would have been happy if we could have assigned just three categories, large, medium, and small; the point is, we wanted to avoid personal judgments. It actually turned out to be quite a finely tuned scale.

Drafting is not only an art, but there's a degree of science as well.

No requirement of industry is so much neglected as operational definitions.

My first job at General Motors was as a quality inspector on the assembly line. I was checking fits between hoods and fenders. I had a little scale and clipboard. At one point, I was probably examining 60 jobs an hour during an eight-hour shift. A job like that teaches you to value all the people who do a job like that.

The advantage of the analytical approach is that it is widely applicable, and it can provide a considerable amount of quantitative information even with a relatively poor resolving power.