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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo

4 years ago

In general, I'm curious devices that detect/measure things at super small scales can have both very high accuracy ratings and very high confidence.

Presumably these devices measure things previously unmeasurable - or at least with as good of accuracy.

I mean, I get that we have hypothesis and have reason to believe nature is going to behave in some way. And then you build the device to measure it, and it comes within some range that's not surprising, and it is inline with previous devices that weren't as accurate.

If you're building a conventional scale - it just seems more reasonable that you can have high confidence and high accuracy because the stuff you're measuring is big enough to physically see and interact with and there's almost limitless things you could use to cross-reference, etc.

Is there an ELI5 for how you can measure things subatomic with ridiculously high accuracy and confidence?

I guess I'm just in complete awe of how this is possible - not doubting that it is.

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onlyrealcuzzo

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lumost  4 years ago

At a large scale it is also very difficult to create high accuracy. Simply defining a meter or kilogram is a high difficulty task, however there is a canonical "kilogram" that you can go and visit in France. Along with a carefully maintained set of proofs that were built off of the canonical "kilogram" which in turn are used to make the calibration weights we all work with. We then measure/calibrate the accuracy of any weight measuring system by how well it tracks to the canonical kilogram.

Similarly, for any "new" measurement, there will be a number of "calibration" measurements performed to ensure that the results are in-line with other measurements of well known things.