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.