Measurement - is it exclusive of an in-depth understanding of something?
Measurements are made on all kinds of things nowadays, from census estimates of human populations to spacecraft trajectories and thrust and impulse calculations…and it has been found that observational understanding on a macro scale can help detect patterns and hence paramaters, distances, angles, phases and corrections and so forth in the patterns of all processes, natural or synthetically engineered.
So is it really necessary to understand things on a micro scale? Is an understanding of the universe in a macro manner not sufficient for our purposes? Or whould we rather not declare our purposes depending on a macro level understanding of things rather than a micro level understanding which we may then deem unnecessary?
Is measuring a process as good as knowing it, or is a qualitative understanding a real understanding of the process better than a quantitative understanding?