Abstract
By now we have given enough examples of measurements of quantities—such as numbers of cholera cases per 10,000 houses, temperatures, weights of hot and cold bodies, rates of mental disorders, and cancer in different places—to make it apparent that measurement plays a central role in science. While not every scientific fact is a numerical one, nor every scientific theory a predictor of numerical magnitudes, so many are that we cannot conceive of modern science without the process of measurement.
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Reference Notes
Joseph F. Mulligan, “Some Recent Determinations of the Velocity of Light,” American Journal of Physics 20 (1952): 165; “Some Recent Determinations of the Velocity of Light, II,” American Journal of Physics 25 (1957):180.
Joseph F. Mulligan, “Some Recent Determinations of the Velocity of Light, III,” American Journal of Physics 44 (1976): 960.
J. H. Sanders, The Velocity of Light (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1965).
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Oscar Morgenstern, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). Reprinted by permission of Princeton University and Professor Morgenstern. Copyright 1968 by Princeton University Press.
Suggested Reading
Errors of measurement are discussed in more detail in Chapter 6 of Freedman, David, Robert Pisani, and Roger Purves, Statistics. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968.
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© 1984 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Goldstein, M., Goldstein, I. (1984). Measurement and Its Pitfalls. In: The Experience of Science. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0384-6_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0384-6_14
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