The power of discovery in science is the ability to distinguish new dimensions in things, new dimensions that can become correlated into functional relationships, idealized into an internal measurement system, and captured in the formulas of a theory. The power of discovery is the ability to articulate wholes into new kinds of parts and new kinds of relationships among parts: to articulate a moving body into mass, acceleration and the force that it undergoes, or to distinguish "heat" into the two factors of "quantity of heat" and "temperature." When such parts are articulated, the thing in question itself becomes seen as a new kind of whole. And progress occurs by zigs and zags: the new theory suggests new measurements and instrumentation, and these in turn suggest new wholes and parts and new theories.
[Robert Sokolowski, Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology, University of Notre Dame Press (Notre Dame, IN: 1992) p. 150.]
