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[Phys-L] Re: fall cleanup: sig figs

Ludwik Kowalski wrote:

And it is silly to penalize students for reporting results with one or
two insignificant digits.

Indeed ... call them "guard digits" and encourage them.

Guard digits are your friends.

========================

Consider the example given earlier: NIST reports Boltzmann's
constant as
1.380 6505(24) e-23 J/K

with 7 decimal places, even though there is considerable
uncertainty in the 6th place. It would be a bad idea to
apply further roundoff to this quantity.