Comment by throwway120385

It's honestly kind of bullshit because the bedrock of a lot of my work is being realistic, and if I had such a piece of crap equipment I would have gladly reported the 6.8 meters per second squared and then turned around and identified all of the problems with my setup right down to characterizing the lag time on the stopwatch start.

In fact one of the trickiest problems I had to resolve once was to show that the reason a piece of equipment couldn't accurately accumulate a volume from a very small flow was because of the fixed-point decimal place they chose. And part of how I did that was by optimizing a measurement device for the compliance of a fixed tube until I got really good, consistent results. Because I knew that those numbers were actually really good it came down to how we were doing math in the computer and then I just had to do an analysis of all of the accumulation and other math to determine what the accumulated error was. It turned out to be in really good agreement with what the device was doing.

All of that came from our initial recognition that the measured quantity was wrong for some reason.