In these blog posts, I aim to present techniques that will help you generally excel in your physics courses and exams, regardless whether you are taking your first high school physics class or your second semester of graduate-level quantum mechanics.  With that goal in mind, we’ve explored ways you can breeze through the math on your homework assignments and test, such as holding off on the calculator and using dimensional analysis.

Welcome to the last post in our series on experimental error! As a physics tutor, I walk you through the experiental process and explore the traps that might lead you down the wrong path.

Over the last several posts, we’ve explored the concepts of accuracy and precision of a measurement, averaging out the noise inherent in your measurement, and identifying and quantifying any biases that might be throwing your results off.   

Every measurement in your physics experiment will have some noise.  How can we measure it, and what can we do to deal with it?

Welcome back to the series of posts on experimental error!  In the first post, we began to explore some of the ways even a fairly simple experiment is prone to unavoidable experimental error.  In this post, we will outline techniques that you can use to mitigate the effects of these unavoidable errors and be able to state the result of your measurement with more certainty.  Whether you are taking your first high school physics course, studying physics in college, or submitting a paper to Science, you need to think about the uncertainties inherent in the experiments you perform.

As an overarching theme, I’ve tried to stress that there is more to studying physics than slogging through the math.  Instead of treating a problem as a series of dry mathematical manipulations, a sequence of numbers that, when punched into the calculator in the correct order, will yield your answer, we should always try to think about the physical intuition that underlies the problem.