CHEM 110H Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Propagation Of Uncertainty, Pyrite, Significant Figures

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15 Feb 2018
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Two recruiters for high tech companies are sitting in a bar after work. In science, knowing the accuracy of a measurement is arguably as important as the result of the measurement itself. Later in the course, we"ll talk about a nobel prize winning discovery that happened only because of careful error analysis. Your future nobel prize, whatever it is about, will likely have something to do with understanding the accuracy of your measurement or theoretical calculations. From a more immediately practical point of view in chemistry 110h, we will take points off your quizzes and exams if you mess up on signficant figures. Significant figures are our shorthand way of keeping track of errors in measurements and calculations. Generally, we assume that the last digit quoted in a measured value is the one that has some uncertainty. For example, let"s say you weigh a sample on a balance and get a value of.