Top Measurement Flashcards

Measurement is one of the most basic and long-standing elements of the scientific method. Any time you make a scientific observation, you need some way of measuring or quantifying it so that you can compare it to other observations. Measurements can cover all sorts of things: they might be based on space, time, force, mass, or all sorts of other concepts.

There are also measures based on a combination of other measures: for example, speed is a measure of distance divided by a measure of time (for example, miles per hour), whereas acceleration is a measure of speed (distance divided by time) divided by ANOTHER measure of time (for example, meters per second per second). In fact, physicists try to reduce all measurements to the smallest possible number of concepts so that they can understand the universe at its most basic level. Based on this line of research, we think the most basic things that can be measured are space-time and mass-energy. All other measurements can be derived from just these two relatively simple concepts.
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