"Measurement is desire to know."
Measurement is not desire to know.
Measurements are undertaken because of desire to know. A measurement is an estimation or quantification along a dimension. Science started with observation. Observaton started from curiosity. Curiosity is one of the more useful characteristics of apes like us.
In the early days of science journals, people would send in drawings of random junk they observed in their telescopes or microscopes. There was no organization - it was a free-for-all.
It took time to figure organize stuff, to figure out patterns and meta-patterns. Some people are really good at observing, others at theorizing (figuring patterns), others still at creating or executing experiments to confirm or disprove these theories. But I think the order goes something like, though not exactly like, this:
Mystery -> curiosity -> qualitative observation -> quantitative observation (measurement) -> organization or classification (pattern matching) -> theorizing -> experimentation.
What can cause a mystery? Well, it's different for different people. For some people, it could be regularity that gets them curious. For others, it could a sudden irregularity in the midst of regularity. And for others, well, they just want to find out.
(Figuring patterns, and not logic, btw, is what human brains are especially well adapted to doing. Not my idea - first pointed out to me by an AI professor, but I agree with it.)
