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What is uncertain?
Virtually every measurement or observation in physics will be uncertain to some degree.
no longer fit. If you are building a computer and the battery delivers too low a voltage, the microprocessor will not work. As an engineer, you will need to work out how much variation in the parts you can tolerate, and still produce a functional final product. Bearing in mind that parts with bigger uncertainties are almost certainly cheaper. If you are building components to sell to someone else, the lower the uncertainty in their production, the more desirable they will be to customers, and hence the more money you can ask for them. Example: in the 1950s, the Japanese had a reputation for producing poor quality goods. They started a campaign to decrease their manufacturing uncertainties, and were so successful that they could routinely produce parts with uncertainties of half or less that achieved by most of their competitors. Before long, cars made using these parts had achieved a reputation for reliability and performance that allowed them to steal the markets of most of their competitors.
Science Answer
Once upon a time, long ago, there were exciting science discoveries that could be made with crude equipment. Unfortunately, you have been born several centuries too late to make these discoveries. All the easy discoveries have been made. To discover something new, you will have to be pushing the boundaries. This could be measuring something that nobody has ever measured before, or measuring something that has been measured before with smaller uncertainties. Example: in the early 1990s astronomers were able to measure the speeds of stars with a precision of around 100m/s. By 1995 they had improved this to about 10 m/s, which allowed them to detect the wiggles caused by planets orbiting these stars. This opened up the whole study of extrasolar planets.
Independent Measurements
If there is uncertainty in your measurement (as is almost always the case), then this will depend on how you make your measurement. If your uncertainty is due to your measuring equipment and you use the same equipment in all measurements, then your measurements are not independent and you probably will get the same answer (which doesnt mean it is right). If the uncertainty is because something depends on the temperature, then a whole bunch of measurements made on a hot summers day will probably come out about the same, but would be different from results obtained in winter. So once again, your measurements are not independent. Truly independent measurements should be made in conditions which allow all the various sources of uncertainty to vary.
Distribution function
If you get different measurements every time you make a reading how can you describe what you get? The most powerful way is to plot a distribution function. This is a histogram of the different measurements. You break up the range over which measurements occur into bins, and for each measurement, see which bin it falls into and add one to that bin. You then plot a graph of bin against the number of measurements that fell into that bin. In Mathematica, type all your measurements into an array (a list separated by commas and enclosed in curly brackets) and give it some name (in this case Ive called it data1) as follows: Data1 = {3.85693, 4.90552, 4.11224, 3.33525, 3.99793, 4.80498, 4.56065, 3.92403, 5.07501, 4.24359, 5.49469, 7.33931, 4.00581, 4.07483, 2.60917, 3.23301, 4.7652, 4.97337, 4.04656, 5.36802} And then plot it using the histogram command, as follows: Histogram[data1, {0.5}, AxesLabel -> {"Value", "Number of Measurements"}, AxesOrigin -> {0.0, 0.0}, PlotRange -> {{0.0, 9.0}, {0.0, 6}}] (.nb. The above works in Mathenatica version 7 in version 6 you need to first type Needs["Histograms`"] to load the histograms package. Version 6 is the one currently installed on the information commons PCs the macs have version 7). What do these distribution functions typically look like? It is usually assumed that they look like Gaussian (also known as normal or bell curve) functions. Here is what one might look like:
You can see that in this case, measurements are typically around 4, but some range as low as 2.5 and higher than 7. The theoretical distribution function is what youd get if you made an infinite number of independent measurements, and might look like:
You can see that in most cases, you have a typical value (in this case around 4.3) with lots of measurements fairly close to that, and a steadily decreasing number of measurements further away. If your measurements really were independent, then the true value of whatever you were trying to measure should be the middle of this histogram (4.3 in this case). You can work out this value by taking the mean of all the data points.
Systematic Uncertainties
Unfortunately, making truly independent observations (ones in which all the sources of variation are allowed to vary over their full range) is often impossible. For example, your equipment may be too expensive to allow you to buy lots of them so if there is an error in it, that error will be in all your data. Or there may be something wrong with your method, but you cannot think of another method. In this case, you may have systematic uncertainties. If this is the case, the centre of distribution may not be a good estimate of the true value.
Engineering Answer
Usually in engineering, uncertainties are measured by quoting the tolerance. This is the range within which the value is guaranteed to lie. So if you say that a battery will deliver 3.4 Volts with a tolerance of 0.1 volts, you are guaranteeing that the voltage will lie between 3.3 and 3.5 volts. Sometimes variations on this are used, such as guaranteeing that 99% of the products will lie within the tolerance rather than all of them.
Science Answer
In physics (and other sciences, and in social science research, and in newspaper opinion poles) uncertainties are measured by quoting the
standard uncertainty or standard error. This is actually defined by an international (ISO) standard. How is this defined? If you measure the same thing repeatedly, each measurement will differ. The standard uncertainty is the standard deviation of all these measurements. What is the standard deviation s? if you measure some parameter x a number n times. The first measurement is x1, the second is x2 and so on. You work out the mean value x by adding up all the measurements and then dividing by the number of measurements, i.e: x1 + x2 + x 3 + .... + x n 1 n x= = ! xi n n i =1 You can then work out the standard deviation s by taking each measurement, working out how far it is from the mean, squaring all these values, dividing by n and taking the square root. 1 n 2 s 2 = " ( xi ! x ) n i =1 You can measure these in Mathematica as follows: Type your data into an array (a list separated by commas and enclosed in curly brackets) and give it some name (in this case Ive called it data1) as follows: data1 = {3.85693, 4.90552, 4.11224, 3.33525, 3.99793, 4.80498, 4.56065, 3.92403, 5.07501, 4.24359, 5.49469, 7.33931, 4.00581, 4.07483, 2.60917, 3.23301, 4.7652, 4.97337, 4.04656, 5.36802} Then use the Mean or StandardDeviation commands: Mean[data1] 4.43631 StandardDeviation[data1] 0.999758
The tolerance in a case like this is a bit unclear most observations are pretty close to the mean x (within one standard deviation s), but you will get the occasional ones that are much further out. If you insist that you never ever get something outside the tolerance, you will need to set the tolerance at perhaps five standard uncertainties. But if you were prepared to have one in a hundred measurements outside your tolerance range, you could use two standard uncertainties. There is a debate within the engineering standards community about whether standard uncertainties may not be a better reflection of reality than tolerances. For the purposes of PHYS1101, always use standard uncertainties.
Uncertainty propagation.
Imagine that you are trying to determine some value X. What you actually measure are some different parameters A and B, and you plug them into an equation to work out X. If you know the uncertainties in A and B (A and B) how do you work out the uncertainty in X (X)? The following equations work if and only if the uncertainties in A and B are uncorrelated. If they are correlated, you need to do something much more complicated (beyond the scope of this course). sum or difference - use the absolute uncertainties: If X = A + B or X = A B then (X)2 = (A)2 + (B)2 product or fraction - use the relative uncertainties: If X = A B or X = A/B then #"x & 2 # "A & 2 #"B & 2 % ( =% ( +% ( $X ' $A' $B' Adding a constant If X = A + C, where C is a constant with negligible uncertainty, then X = A Multiplying by a Constant If X = CA, where C is a constant with negligible uncertainty, X = C A Raising to a Constant power If X = An, and the uncertainty in n is small enough to ignore, then "X " =n A X A
Logarithms If X = ln(A) (log to the base e), then: " "X = A A Exponents If X = eA, then: "X = "A X General Rule All the above equations, and many more, can be deduced from the following general rule. The general rule for calculating the uncertainty of any function of individually measured values X = f(A,B,C, . . . ) is 2 2 2 2 ("x ) = ("x,A ) + ("x,B ) + ("x,C ) +K where
$ #X ' "X ,A = & )"A % #A (
and so on. This uses partial differentiation, which you may not yet be familiar with. Dont worry if it makes no sense you can just use above simpler equations.
Using Uncertainty
Quoting Uncertainties
Sometimes the aim of your experiment is simply to measure some parameter for other people to use. In this case, you must always quote the uncertainty you measure. The best way to do this is explicitly i.e: A = 46.53 0.4 You should do this wherever possible in this course, and in all science courses at the ANU (and indeed in all your work as a scientist). A lazier way to point out the uncertainty in a result is to imply it by how many significant figures you quote. You should not quote significant figures that affect the number by much less than the uncertainty. There is no hard and fast rule for this if A = 46.53 0.4, you would be OK quoting A = 46.5 or A = 46.53, but not A = 50 or A = 46.5310784, as these would give a reader a false sense of your uncertainties.
measured results (complete with uncertainties) either with a theoretical prediction or with someone elses results. You may be comparing a single number (such as the value of some constant) or a whole set of numbers (such as a spectrum).
Null Hypothesis
You can never prove a theory true. Even if your data agree very well, future, more precise data may at some later stage prove a theory wrong. What you can do is prove theories wrong. You should start by defining a null hypothesis that you want to disprove. This null hypothesis is typically that the theory is correct or The other persons data which Im trying to test is correct. You then try to prove this wrong.