Observation is either an activity of a living being, consisting of receiving knowledge of the outside world through the sense, or the recording of data using scientific instruements. The term may also refer to any datum collected during this activity.
Observation plays a role in several steps. However the need for reproducibility requires that observations by different observers be comparabe, verifiable and falsifiable. Human sense imperssions are subjective and qualitative making them difficult to record or compare. The idea of measurement evolved to allow recording and comparison of observations made at different times and places by different people. Measurement consists of using observation to compare the thing being measured to a standard; an artifact, process or efinition which can be duplicated or shared by all observers and counting how many of the standard units are comparabe to the object. Measurement reduces an observation to a number which can be recorded, and two observations which result in the same number are equal within the resolution of the process.
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