The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

You may think the title means that if you measure accurately you will get an accurate measurement, and if not then not, but it refers to a much more subtle thing—the way you choose to measure things controls to a large extent what happens. I repeat the story Eddington told about the fishermen who went fishing with a net. They examined the size of the fish they caught and concluded there was a minimum size to the fish in the sea. The instrument you use clearly affects what you see. The current popular example of this effect is the use of the bottom line of the profit and loss statement every quarter to estimate how well a company is doing, which produces a company interested mainly in short-term profits and which has little regard to long-term profits.