propagation of error
rallain | March 16, 2009I previously talked about measurements (some) when I looked at the uncertainty in the distance to the Sun. One of the simple ways of determining the uncertainty of a calculated quantity is to use the uncertainty of the measured variables and find the max and min that calculated quantity can be. The example I used was in calculating the uncertainty for the area of a rectangle. So, the maximum and min areas would be:
And then the uncertainty in the area can be described as:
Yes, I know this is not as sophisticated as the normal procedure for error propagation, but it works. This is the…