Saturday, December 21, 2013

"Significance" in data analysis

A friend recently brought this article to my attention. Altough it is specifically about the massive confusion in the general public about the distinction between a theory (very highly reliable, like the Theory of Special and General Relativity) and a law (only useful under special conditions, like the Ideal Gas Law), it makes a great point about data analysis in item 4.

Read it here.

Although crude, this diagram explaining the 'normal' distribution gives a nice picture of the basic criteria we use when interpreting data in the first-year physics lab, specifically the conclusing that a difference of more than two standard deviations indicates a disagreement between two measurements or between theory and experiment.

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