Significant Figures

Audrey and I are taking physics together. Neither one of us has ever taken physics before, so this could get interesting. The home school instructor is definitely not the teacher this time around, but maybe we can learn together.

Of course, Audrey and I took chemistry together last year, which means I kept up with her for the first three or four units. I had a pretty good grade until I quit reading the chapters and quit doing the assignments. Nonetheless, I had to drop out. Incomplete. Withdrawn due to lack of time.

I also started Spanish when the girls began studying foreign language. That lasted about two weeks. My daughters are beginning to speak to each other, just a little, in this foreign tongue, but I still only know one Spanish phrase.

I love learning new things, but learning takes time. Too often I have too many other responsibilities and joys calling my name, so I wind up leaving the bulk of academic studies to my children.

And now it's physics. Audrey and I sat down last night for a review of the mathematical concepts used in physics. One of the topics was significant figures.

My brain has never been really good at comprehending scientific definitions. I want scientific definitions to explain what I have seen and experienced, but the steps between the definitions and the observable world are often long and seem convoluted. Take significant figures, for example. The scientific community defines significant figures as "the digits of the decimal form of a number beginning with the leftmost nonzero digit and extending to the right to include all digits warranted by the accuracy of measuring devices used to obtain the numbers."

But to me, when you say "significant figures," I think of these:

I am thankful for so very many significant figures in my life. I could never put them all up here. This is merely a random sampling, a representative grouping, a collection of specimens, a subset of a larger set.

Note for family members: You are conspicuous by your absence. But don't feel badly - if even my own children are missing from the "sig figs" list, you know I just decided that posting the people I love in my family was too big of a task. Isn't that a great problem to have?

I love you all.