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Topic: Maintaining Significant Digits during a unit conversion  (Read 3416 times)

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Offline jwj11

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Maintaining Significant Digits during a unit conversion
« on: March 12, 2008, 11:49:38 PM »
Let's us say I was given 100.0 kg of something.
That number has 4 significant digits.
Now let's say I wanted to convert that to grams.
It would be 100,000g.

but even if I write that as 100,000. it would be 6 significant digits.
Is my only option for this case to write it in scientific notation?

SO it would be 1.000*10^5 g
Right?
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Offline Borek

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Re: Maintaining Significant Digits during a unit conversion
« Reply #1 on: March 13, 2008, 03:59:37 AM »
OK
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Offline achibaby1974

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Re: Maintaining Significant Digits during a unit conversion
« Reply #2 on: March 13, 2008, 09:48:51 AM »
Quote from: jwj11 on March 12, 2008, 11:49:38 PM

Is my only option for this case to write it in scientific notation?

SO it would be 1.000*10^5 g
Right?

Yeah that's right since you want only 4 sig fig. b/c that's what you started with. It looks kinda funky I know. I haven't gotten quite used to it either.
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