HP calcs are really not that accurate..

[AlexFekken]

(12-03-2017 01:49 AM)SlideRule Wrote:  Might I suggest

Sorry, haven't read the books (yet). But I think I did get a decent training in the principles covered, and this prompted me to write up this rant:

My previoius post reminded me of literally the first two basic principles that I learned when I started studying physics (and mathematics) at university in 1976:

1 - a number is totally meaningless if you don't specify its units
2 - a number is also totally meaningless if you don't specify its error margin

Now 1 is usually implied by context, but 2 still seems to be consistently neglected, sometimes even by people who did read the books and should know better (e.g. Feynman wrote that error margins for a number of space shuttle components were clearly reverse engineered from the requirements).

Now back in 1976 we had to rely on custom applications to process data with error margins. But I wonder why this is still the case now. My favourite, somewhat biased :-), answer is:

It is politically incorrect to teach scientifically correct thinking to the masses. It might hurt their brains, or worse, they might pick it up.

But still, should we not have an abundance of (freely available) tools now to do, for example, interval arithmetic? And should these not be the standard in scientific education by now. Clearly, this is much more fundamental and important than e.g. CAS or graphing capabilties.

And then threads like this would not even exist...