{"id":218,"date":"2006-04-27T06:48:57","date_gmt":"2006-04-27T06:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/04\/27\/uncertain-pop-quiz-1\/"},"modified":"2006-04-27T06:48:57","modified_gmt":"2006-04-27T06:48:57","slug":"uncertain-pop-quiz-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/04\/27\/uncertain-pop-quiz-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncertain Pop Quiz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Imagine that you are doing a physics lab to measure the velocity of a small projectile. After making a bunch of measurements to four significant figures, and doing a bunch of arithmetic, you get a value of 4.371928645 m\/s. After yet more gruelling math, you find the uncertainty associated with this number to be 0.0316479825 m\/s.<\/p>\n<p>How do you report your answer in a lab report?<\/p>\n<p>(There was talk a while back about getting ScienceBlogs some fancy poll software that would allow me to do this with radio buttons and automatic counting, but I don&#8217;t know how to do that yet, and I&#8217;m curious about the answer now, so we&#8217;ll do this old-school. Choose from the list of answers provided below the fold, and post a comment giving your answer.)<\/p>\n<p>(Please note that you don&#8217;t need to be a scientist, or have taken a physics class in order to answer this. In fact, the less physics background you have, the better&#8211; I&#8217;m genuinely curious about what the average person thinks the right answer should be. The correct answer, and the reason for the question, will be posted here tomorrow.)<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A)  4.371928645 +\/- 0.0316479825 m\/s<\/li>\n<li>B)  4.372 +\/- 0.03165 m\/s<\/li>\n<li>C) 4.372 +\/- 0.032 m\/s <\/li>\n<li>D) 4.37 +\/- 0.03 m\/s <\/li>\n<li>E) Some other answer that I will explain in comments.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Imagine that you are doing a physics lab to measure the velocity of a small projectile. After making a bunch of measurements to four significant figures, and doing a bunch of arithmetic, you get a value of 4.371928645 m\/s. After yet more gruelling math, you find the uncertainty associated with this number to be 0.0316479825&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/04\/27\/uncertain-pop-quiz-1\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Uncertain Pop Quiz<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}