Measurement and metrology

A saying goes round German laboratories and workshops: Wer misst, misst Mist — whoever measures, measures rubbish. The joke is in the sound, because misst and Mist are pronounced exactly alike, and it is usually muttered at the moment a reading looks too good or too strange to be true. It is not a claim that measuring is pointless. It is a reminder that a reading carries error until somebody has shown how much: a probe in the wrong place, a zero that has wandered, a pointer read at an angle. The longer form, wer viel misst, misst viel Mist, warns that more readings and more decimal places are not the same as more knowledge. English reaches for ‘garbage in, garbage out’, which blames what went into the machine; the German blames the act of measuring itself, and the person doing it. Most of this list is the vocabulary of that healthy suspicion: die Messunsicherheit, die Plausibilitätsprüfung, die Rückführung.