23 Nov
2013
23 Nov
'13
9:34 p.m.
This is my chance to ask: When a physicist writes a measurement like 548.57990943 ± 0.00000023, does the number after the ± represent the standard deviation (root-mean-squared error), or something else? Thanks, Dan On 2013-11-23, at 7:57 PM, Rowan Hamilton wrote:
Physicists spend a great deal of time and effort on understanding the errors in any physical measurement. A particle physics PhD involves about 2 years of classes, 2 years of slave labor, 1 year of measurement and then 3 years of error analysis. This is no joke. Since particle physics is an inherently statistical field, particle physicists are experts at error analysis.