Thread: Is that possible?

My friend told me he weight the mass of a peanut, which is 0.76129800098764g.

I'm really confused, can he really get the mass of a peanut that accurate?

Jin Guangnian

Don't know about weighing one single peanut. But it'd be easy enough to get an answer like that if you started by carefully, exactly weighing bulk peanuts then counted out the individual peanuts in the bag. Divide one by the other and you might get that kind of an answer.

I think that, due to variation in size and density it is impossible to say that all peanuts have that mass however that particular peanut may have a mass of 0.76129800098764g

I think he got the figure using the "burning the single peanut calorie measure" school science (usually biology) experiment.

Peanut Lab for the experiment

Or perhaps your friend as access to something like this.

watt-balance_2.jpg

Or he could have painstakingly counted the number of peanuts in a 1kg jar, measured the jar without the peanuts, measured it with peanuts, then took the mean weight and he might have got a very long number on the calculator, but this does not give him the leeway to claim that his measurement qualified to be accurate to that many decimal places.

Originally Posted by pyoko

I think he got the figure using the "burning the single peanut calorie measure" school science (usually biology) experiment.

Peanut Lab for the experiment

That looks like a great approach to science teaching! (We had one teacher who was a bit like that.) But I really hope he gets them to consider the sources of experimental error (they must be huge!)

Dear fellow members, this is a set up. Since you have all agreed that weighing an individual peanut to this accuracy is not possible and have called into question the number of significant figure, experimental error, etc, tomjin can now say - "And yet this is the accuracy which is required from a Cavendish balance and so our theories of gravity are wrong."

tomjin?

Originally Posted by John Galt

Dear fellow members, this is a set up. Since you have all agreed that weighing an individual peanut to this accuracy is not possible and have called into question the number of significant figure, experimental error, etc, tomjin can now say - "And yet this is the accuracy which is required from a Cavendish balance and so our theories of gravity are wrong."

tomjin?

Oh, oh, oh!!..... HOLLOW EARTH can now be real!!!