Error Theory And Data Processing

Physics always strives towards to understand the material universe. In order to gain this understanding, we systematically question nature through experiment. So physics is a science based on experiment and measurement. No matter what precautions are taken there will always have a difference between the result of a measurement and the true value of a quantity, which means the measurement error is in existence. Hence, the measurement error indwells all of the scientific experiments and measurement activities. In order to get measurement results that closes to the true value, we need to grasp the data processing and data comparison principally involves the ideas of measurement and uncertainty. This paper discusses the origin and sort of error theory and the different representations of error, such as random error, systematic error, bias error and so on. We give a statistical method to determine the bias data. Due to the traditional error theory often arouse chaoes and confutions to the measurementer, while with the international organizations' popularizing, the measurement uncertainty gradually substitute the error theory. It provides a guarantee to evaluate the measurement results scientificlly and all the measurements have an associated uncertainty which can and should be quatified and reported with the level of confidence. Then we present the differences between the error and uncertainty. We also discussed some data processing methods, such as how to make a neat table, how to make a fitting curve, and the regression and the applications of the method of least squares curve fitting using polynomials are briefly discussed. In order to calculate conveniently, we introduced the use of excel in data processing in chapter 5.We compare some regular data processing methods to the methods introduced in this paper in physics experiments.