page_title: Measuring instrument
section_title: Electricity, electronics and electrical engineering
hierarchical_section_title: Measuring instrument / Electricity, electronics and electrical engineering
context_page_description: A measuring instrument is a device for measuring a physical quantity. In the physical sciences, quality assurance, and engineering, measurement is the activity of obtaining and comparing physical quantities of real-world objects and events. Established standard objects and events are used as units, and the process of measurement gives a number relating the item under study and the referenced unit of measurement. Measuring instruments, and formal test methods which define the instrument's use, are the means by which these relations of numbers are obtained. All measuring instruments are subject to varying degrees of instrument error and measurement uncertainty.
  These instruments may range from simple objects such as rulers and stopwatches to electron microscopes and particle accelerators. Virtual instrumentation is widely used in the development of modern measuring instruments.
context_section_description: Considerations related to electric charge dominate electricity and electronics.
  Electrical charges interact via a field. That field is called electric field.If the charge doesn't move. If the charge moves, thus realizing an electric current, especially in an electrically neutral conductor, that field is called magnetic.
  Electricity can be given a quality — a potential.  And electricity has a substance-like property, the electric charge.
  Energy (or power) in elementary electrodynamics is calculated by multiplying the potential by the amount of charge (or current) found at that potential:  potential times charge (or current). (See Classical electromagnetism and its Covariant formulation of classical electromagnetism)
caption: An instrument for detecting net charges, the electroscope.
exif: {}