Quotes About Quantification

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

It's very difficult to tell when you're successful, because it's so hard to make measurements.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

Luego me midieron el dedo pulgar de la mano derecha, y no necesitaron más, pues por medio de un cálculo matemático, según el cual dos veces la circunferencia del dedo pulgar es una vez la circunferencia de la muñeca

Something on the order of 107 billion modern humans have existed, though this number depends on when exactly you start counting.

The learned compute that seven hundred and seven millions of millions of vibrations have penetrated the eye before the eye can distinguish the tints of a violet. What philosophy can calculate the vibrations of the heart before it can distinguish the colours of love?

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.

We allow ourselves to believe that nature can be explained. In the process we confine nature to those explanations. The eels, through their simplicity of form, their preference for darkness, and their grace of movement in the opposite direction of every other fish, have helped me to see things for which there is no easy classification, things that can't be quantified or solved, and get to the essence of experience. They have been my way back.

I can even work out your personality problems to ten decimal places if it will help.

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.

The age of the universe is not just 'a guess', but rather it is a carefully measured number that is now known to a high degree of accuracy.

Technological man can't believe in anything that can't be measured, taped, or put into a computer.

If we believe something does not exist unless we measure it, then we put aside: love, feeling, intuition, art and philosophy.

Numbers and more numbers...the future of mankind has come down to decimals. I guess you will figure that out, eventually.

Emptiness is everywhere and it can be calculated, which gives us a great opportunity. I know how to control the universe. So tell me, why should I run for a million?

The Munduruku have many things, but not enough numbers to count them. Cantor has provided us with as many numbers as we like, but there are no longer enough things to count.

Happiness quantification sounds a bit wishy-washy, sure, and through a series of carefully administered surveys across the globe, economists and psychologists have certainly confronted a fair number of sticky issues around how to measure, and even define, happiness.

I don't believe in statistics. There are too many factors that can't be measured. You can't measure a ballplayer's heart.

The only thing worth believing in is measurement.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.

Words described real experiences, and their curves and lines left a mental trail for me to follow by sense memory, whereas numbers threw curves at me and stonewalled me with their lines, barring me from understanding them, where they came from, and where they went. Math did not describe anything to me; if people themselves were often disconnected parts—sometimes one, sometimes many—how could I hope to quantify the rest of the world? Discrete amounts had little meaning for me.

Can you measure it? Can you express it in figures? Can you make a model of it? If not, your theory is apt to be based more upon imagination than upon knowledge.

We carve up the world and crown it with numbers—lumens, ounces, decibels. All these things and what to do with them. We carve up the world all the time.

We carve up the world/and crown it with numbers—lumens, ounces,/decibels. All these things and what to do with them.