Tom Chatfield Quotes

Netflix and Amazon know when you stop and start a program, whether you wanted the whole thing, all of that.

All of the studies we do in my group are quantified.

The heart of science is measurement.

Science cannot progress without reliable and accurate measurement of what it is you are trying to study. The key is measurement, simple as that.

There are many things that you can't measure. But the great fun of what I do for a living is figuring out ways to measure things that people previously considered intangible.

Google, Facebook, and the thousands of other companies that seek to join their ranks do more every day to collect data about you and I than any surveillance state could ever accomplish. They track our behavior, our communications. The moment to moment decisions we make in every room of our house

There is no shortage of mechanisms by which to measure almost anything.

One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.

Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an e-mail, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card somewhere, you leave a trace, and the Government has decided that it's good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you've never been suspected of doing a crime.

You'll never be able to really measure anything, right? Including teachers.

The old story is a story of measurement. And the New Story is to bring measurement and meaning together. You cannot measure meaning.

We turn to quantities when we can't compare the qualities of things.

In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.

As with marathon runs and lengths of toilet paper, there had to be standards to measure up to.

To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all.

I often say that 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 meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

It's not about size, it's a science.

Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.

The laboratory routine, which involves a great deal of measurement, filing, and tabulation, is either my lifeline or my chief handicap, I hardly know which.

If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. It has long been known that one horse can run faster than another - but which one? Differences are crucial.

Time is a measure of space, just as a range-finder is a measure of space, but measuring locks us into the place we measure.

Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

As I considered the matter carefully it gradually came to light that all those matters only were referred to mathematics in which order and measurements are investigated, and that it makes no difference whether it be in numbers, figures, stars, sounds or any other object that the question of measurement arises. I saw consequently that there must be some general science to explain that element as a whole which gives rise to problems about order and measurement, restricted as these are to no special subject matter. This, I perceived was called 'universal mathematics'.

It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth