• SippyCup@feddit.nl
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    2 days ago

    14 decimal places is more accuracy than you’d ever need.

    Consider the size of what you’re measuring.

    I’m American so you’re getting SAE units, deal with it.

    If we have a radius of 1", the circumference of my object is 6.283185 or so inches around. Maybe it’s 6.283186. the difference between those two numbers is one one hundred thousandths of an inch. About 25 nanometers. Half the size of the smallest bacterium we’ve ever discovered.

    That is with 6 decimal places. With 8 you can measure a circumference with an accuracy to the single atom. Any smaller than that, and you start charging the result by measuring it at all.