SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
Everyone measured.
It broke anyway.
Things that broke because two people measured correctly.
Five cases. In each one, skilled people measured carefully, used different units, and the thing was destroyed anyway. Every date and figure here is checked against a primary source before it is written. The ones that cannot be checked are cut, including the ones everybody repeats.
- Sheet
- 01
- Subject
- Unit and measurement error
- Cases
- 05
- Claims mapped
- 36
- Verified
- 29 of 36
- Figures cut
- 9
Index of cases
Order follows the video
- 01 Mars Climate Orbiter · 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter: a factor of 4.45, filed hundreds of times The software aboard the spacecraft was correct. A program on the ground wrote pound-seconds where the specification required newton-seconds, and every thruster firing entered the navigation model 4.45 times too weak. ×4.45 2 cut · 1 org
- 02 Laufenburg bridge · 2004 Laufenburg: 27 centimetres, subtracted instead of added, became 54 Germany measures height from the North Sea and Switzerland from the Mediterranean. The 27-centimetre offset between them was known, drawn correctly, and applied with the wrong sign. 54 cm 3 cut · 1 org
- 03 SNCF platforms · 2014 SNCF: 1,300 platforms of 8,700, measured from the wrong thirty years The trains were built exactly to specification. The specification came from platform dimensions sampled only from platforms built in the previous three decades, and most French platforms are older than that. 1,300 2 cut · 2 orgs
- 04 Vasa · 1628 The Vasa: two feet in one hull, one of 11 inches and one of 12 Four carpenters' rules were recovered from the wreck, all slightly different. Two were marked in Swedish feet of twelve inches, two in Amsterdam feet of eleven. Every one of them was used correctly. 14 mm 1 cut · 3 orgs
- 05 Hubble mirror · 1990 Hubble: NASA puts the spacing error at 1.3 millimetres The mirror was tested. The instrument built to test it had a lens in the wrong place, so the polishing machine stopped at the wrong moment and the test it had to pass was the test that was broken. 1.3 mm 1 cut · 2 orgs
Red marks the wrong magnitude. It is used for nothing else on this site.
First video · 9 min
Everyone Measured Correctly. It All Broke Anyway.
The five cases in one cut, with the sources on screen. Every article here is the written version of a chapter, with the full source apparatus attached.
The method
A thousand sites tell the orbiter story. This one tells you what it cut.
Two sources means two organisations. Two pages of the same site, a site and its own syndication, or three outlets running one wire story are one source. A figure carried by a single organisation is attributed to it by name or it is dropped. A figure nothing holds up is dropped, and not softened into reportedly.
The first video mapped 36 claims and verified 29. 9 figures were cut. Across these 5 articles there are 9 source entries, each one named.
Read the protocol