Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge
We Have Ways of Making You Talk, or, Long Live Peircism-Popperism-NeymanPearson Thought! After I'd bungled teaching it enough times to have an idea of what I was doing, one of the first things students in my introductory physics classes learned (or anyway were taught), and which I kept hammering at all semester, was error analysis: estimating the uncertainty in measurements, propagating errors from measured quantities into calculated ones, and some very quick and dirty significance tests, tests for whether or not two numbers agree, within their associated margins of error. I did this for purely pragmatic reasons: it seemed like one of the most useful things we were supposed to teach, and also one of the few areas where what I did had any discernible effect on what they learnt. Now that I've read Mayo's book, I'll be able to offer another excuse to my students the next time I teach error analysis, namely, that it's how science really works.