6 - March - 2017 Propagated Uncertainty in measurements

James Okamura
Daniel Guzman
Alejandro Rodriguez
March 6, 2017

The object of this lab was to measure two cylindrical objects (1 Aluminum and 1 Zinc) for its height and diamter and measure those masses using a balance and with that we are able to determine the density of these two cylindrical objects.

We first obtain a caliper ( see the picture below) from the professor and was told on how to use it to measure both the diameter and height of each respective objects. We then went on to measure each masses using a balance.

The top measurements are for the Aluminum rod and the bottom measurements are for the Zinc rods respectively. When we measured each of our variable ( height, diameter and mass), we took into where the uncertainly lies within its respective measurements.

Next, we went on to calculating density of each of these two rods, but before we did that, we took the partial derivative of our density formula to help us determine our uncertainty in our density value. 

I did these calculations to determine the Aluminum rod's density with the uncertainty that lies with it.

I did these calculations to determine the Zinc's rod density with the uncertainty value that lies with it.

I believe one error we may have had when doing this lab was when we were using the caliper to measure the diameter and the height of the rods. We could have made a rounding error when we measured it so that will affect our values for density with its propagated uncertainty.

I believe one thing I learned in this lab apart from learning how to use a caliper, is how to determine the uncertainty value in our density value when our measurements we took has uncertainty in them. Uncertainty values are important because we can not truly take the exact measurement of any object, so the uncertainty value helps be relatively close to our true value.