User:Wdl1961/sandbox3

(in)flexible thinking

My first measurement lesson came from my grandfather when i was eight years old. He told me about a farmer who needed to make a band around a tree. His visiting son from the university was there and measured the diameter of the tree and got his sliderule or log table and was busy calculating  the length. The farmer pulled a string out of his pocket and put it around the tree and marked it. Then he said to his son do not bother i got it. Newton and all those people who did not know much about the speed of light did the best they could with what they had. The same still true and  to insist that a physicist in a laboratory has to use an  obsolete  meter is not realistic. No carpenter or engineer will care  if the accuracy is  10^-8 or 10^-11. just do not impose on other people your point of view no matter what the circumstance is. The speed of light is now defined as 299 ... ... m/s. No problem ,i still use my old meter (oops yard ). My personal experience about accuracy. Working on waveguide computer programs i used a Bessel function routine with an accuracy  of 10^-11. Problem it did not work. Rewriting and using the basic series expansion the problem disappeared. Point :use or make the right tool for the job at hand.