“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.”
—Galileo Galilei

It’s all well and good to say that metrology “includes all theoretical and practical aspects of measurement,” but that doesn’t adequately express its gestalt, which I think even metrologists would agree is hard to measure.

In gestalt psychology, any integrated structure or pattern that has specific properties (and surely that qualifies as a broad-brush definition of metrology) can neither be derived from the elements of the structure nor considered simply as a sum of its elements. (Thanks, Webster’s.)

In other words, metrology has to be more than adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Trying to describe it reminds me of the time I spent in Alaska. I could see the landscape, observe the way people lived, notice the wide swings in daylight hours, but I didn’t understand how different it was from the “lower 48” until I’d been there for several months. Then, quite suddenly, its immensity hit me. It was so vast and wild that my mind had no point of reference to offer at first.

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