Observation

An observation is the act of perceiving something about the world. The output of an observation is a description, and the name of that description is a property.

Observation lives inside a larger process called characterization, a series of man-made processes for the observation, identification, and description of the characteristics of a material. We perceive a feature of something; we identify what we perceived; we give the description a name and a value. The whole sequence runs from the world to the property.

The instrument used here is what Joël de Rosnay calls the macroscope: a symbolic instrument that filters details and amplifies that which links things together. It is not used to make things larger or smaller but to observe what is at once too great, too slow, and too complex for our eyes. For chemistry, the macroscope is blind to atoms, molecules, subatomic and elementary particles. Its subject is systems and the interactions among their parts.

Observation in this sense is a doing, not a having. Features of the world exist whether or not anyone is looking; that is one of the assumptions you accept walking in. But observation is what turns those features into properties, and properties into chemical knowledge. Without observation there is only the world; with it, the world becomes describable.