Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug
psud@aussie.zone 4 days agoThat’s close enough for radio. You can’t cut an antenna much closer than that precision, and it’ll stretch or shrink with temperature anyway. I guess the error could add up enough to be a problem in lengths of fibre optic cables, especially as they run at about c/3
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
That’s kind of the beauty here, you only get a relative error (0.069%) and it’s mostly insignificant to the point of being smaller than your fabrication tolerances. This should also be the case for fibre optics. The error can’t really add up, you scale everything to a multiple of the wavelength and you calculate the wavelength using the speed of light.