- Students will be able to define length, mass, temperature, and time and indicate these quantities using appropriate units.
- Students will be able to measure able to measure length, mass, and time using appropriate instrumentation.
- Students will be able to interpret the SI prefixes and use them to convert between related units.
- Students will be able to describe the difference between accurate and precise measurements.
Chapter 3 Measurement
Without measurements, it is hard to do physics. You can have some conceptual ideas for how different concepts relate to each other, but it will not be very clear how you would communicate them. For example, you can know that a "big" object weighs more than a "small" object, but if I give you an object, you won’t be able to describe its weight without referencing some other objects. And those comparisons will likely be very loose. So it is important for us to spend a little time talking about measurements and getting some more experience with them.
