FeynmansMiniHands

FeynmansMiniHands t1_j0i741e wrote

This is a common but incorrect feeling. Unless you work in a lab with NIST certified equipment, the glass thermometers used by 18th century english scientists are almost certainly both more accurate and more precise than any thermometer you've ever handled.

The CET dataset only specifies temperatures to a 0.1 degree precision, which even the earliest mercury thermometers could achieve.

Science and technology has improved, but we don't need to measure temperature out to the 5th decimal places for climatology.

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