3: The Treatment of Experimental Uncertainty — Read

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Learning Objectives

After completing the readings and practice problems recommended in this module, you should be able to:

Describe and give examples of the following types of error that effect physical measurements, and identify the types of uncertainties that affect precision and those that affect accuracy.
- Gross / personal error
- Systematic error
- Random error
- Determinate error
- Indeterminate error
Describe strategies for optimizing the accuracy of physical measurements and evaluating the precision of physical measurements.
Identify the sources of random error in a measurement.
Propagate uncertainty using mathematics.
Report values and their uncertainties in the proper form (applying the rules of significant figures to correctly indicate precision).

3.1: Pre-lab Assignment
3.2: Characterizing Experimental Uncertainty
Two essential questions arise from any set of data. First, does our measure of central tendency agree with the expected result? Second, why is there so much variability in the individual results? The first of these questions addresses the accuracy of our measurements and the second addresses the precision of our measurements. In this section we consider the types of experimental errors that affect accuracy and precision.
3.3: Estimating and Reporting Uncertainties (Statistics, Propogation, and Rounding)
3.4: Least Squares Linear Regression
3.5: Rejection of Outliers (Q-test)
3.6: Guidelines for Managing and Reporting Uncertainty in Experiments
3.7: Homework Problems
3.8: References and Additional Reading

This page titled 3: The Treatment of Experimental Uncertainty was last modified on Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:29:03 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Kathryn Haas.

Contents

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Learning Objectives