Document Type

Book

Publisher

Utah State University

Publication Date

1-13-2025

First Page

1

Last Page

149

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Abstract

This text is based on the graduate Measurements course notes from BLS at Utah State University. It is intended as a textbook for graduate students in engineering or physics or as a reference text.

If one collects several texts on measurement uncertainty, it quickly becomes clear that the measurement uncertainty community lacks a consistent language or nomenclature. This can be confusing to a new reader who may view measurement uncertainty as a very old and settled topic. The lack of consensus on nomenclature likely stems from the lack of a clear winner–a paradigm and nomenclature set sufficiently superior to be adopted by everyone. It is our hope that this book will improve on previous texts.

In addition, this text will attempt to move beyond traditional thinking about measurement uncertainty that is limited to point measurements and uncertainties that are either fixed or linearly related to the reading. With a special focus on camera-based measurements and their unique issues, it is our ambition to write the first modern measurement uncertainty text.

The authors wish to acknowledge a debt to Hugh Coleman and Glenn Steele and their 3rd edition text [1], which made progress in the directions that we hope to continue; towards a richer and more realistic uncertainty analysis that considers material property uncertainties as well as the positive and negative impacts of correlated uncertainties. This text was later revised into the 4th edition [2], which added some small but significant changes.

Additionally, the authors would like to thank many individuals who gave specific input. Steve Beresh and Randy Hurd were kind enough to provide a very comprehensive review of the text. Geordie Richards guided us through several issues with respect to statistics. Alan Nathan reviewed some of the baseball examples and Bill Zwolinski engaged in many fruitful conversation about instrument specifications. Finally, BLS would have never been interested in this topic without the excellent mentorship of Dr. Greg Swift of Los Alamos National Laboratories.

Comments

Barton L. Smith, orcid id 0000-0002-1461-5888

Douglas R Neal, orcid id 0000-0001-6400-4746

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