This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Kendra Kirai: I have to wonder about the wording of the main article...it makes it sound like it's easy to just recalibrate instruments to give any sort of detail or clarity. But to do that requires a baseline to measure by, and even then, many instruments are simply incapable of reaching so high.
For example, you can't weigh a car on a bathroom scale, even if you recalibrate it to it's absolute lowest setting (Which would logically give the greatest weight range). A Thermometer is dependant on the amount of mercury present for the heat to expand or contract. At a certain point, a geiger counter's ability to detect radiated atomic particles will get overwhelmed, and read as being completely surrounded and you simply won't get any more information besides what amounts to "A lot."
Light and heat are perhaps the only examples where this is surmountable, because it's always possible to look for the 'darker' or 'colder' spots if your instruments are sensitive enough. The other instances are there to show that, despite being part of (often) an interstellar empire, possibly spanning the galaxy, that even with all of that information available to calibrate against and measure...nobody was expecting something that big. Take for example, a supernova. When a supernova occurs, it shines brighter than the entire galaxy..it lights up the universe. Not much is going to be able to properly measure that sort of energy output, particularly since they don't happen very often to begin with..Not much chance for proper study for measurement purposes.
(Months, maybe over a year, later) There, I've tweaked it a little to explain that in real life, it's not as simple as just recalibrating the instruments.
