PHYS 257 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Normal Distribution, Gaussian Function, Standard Deviation
21 Feb 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
In lab, simulated data set of 500 independent experiments of 20 measurements. Distribution of means (2nd graph) still centered at mean, but smaller width (this is what we did in lab 2) Standard dev lower in distribution of means (where n = 20) This standard deviation is the uncertainty of the mean. Like randomly picking 20 numbers from the first graph then calculating their mean (keep doing that until you"ve used all the data points) and then plotting these means to make the. What this fundamental result determines is the level of confidence you should have in your single experiment. (you don"t do 500 experiments, you just did one, but you should determine how certain your result is) Ex: opinion polls and the reporting of results in physics. The poll surveyed 1002 quebecers from october 10-22. it is considered accurate to within. 4. 3% is 4 sigma of their results (+/- 2 sigma on either side of the mean)
