Abstract

Measurement is quantitative observation and well known to be of great importance to science. However, measurements involving biological systems are complicated by the complexity of cells and tissues, particularly if fields are expected to interact weakly and if field-induced changes are found to be small. Some key parameters, like the temperature coefficient of a measured quantity, may easily be inadequately characterized, and related quantities may thus be determined incompletely. Detection is a special case of measurement, where the measurement is so coarse that an observer can only distinguish between “signal” and “no signal.”