SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
Everyone measured.
It broke anyway.
Things that broke because two people measured correctly.
The premise
Two people measure the same thing. Both are right.
The rule
A figure nothing holds up is cut, not softened into reportedly.
Synthetic
Sheet 01 · the record
- Sheet
- 01
- Cases
- 05
- Claims mapped
- 36
- Verified
- 29 / 36
- Figures cut
- 9
- Sources
- 9
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.
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.
NASA · KSC
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.
Synthetic · not the bridge
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.
Pexels · SNCF Inoui
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.
Synthetic
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.
NASA · MSFC
The cut register
And these are the figures this site does not publish.
The five magnitudes you just read survived the check. These 9 did not. Each one circulates, each one is repeated, and none of them is held up by two independent organisations.
226 km
UNVERIFIED
Repeated in most retellings and absent from the investigation report. No intended altitude is stated here.
$125 million
DISPUTED
$125M, $327.6M and other totals circulate. The report contains no cost figure, so this site uses none.
1876
DISPUTED
A search result asserts it. The primary source says construction started in 2002. The 1876 date belongs to an earlier bridge at the same town.
2003
UNVERIFIED
Widely given, and absent from the retrieved source, which is dated January 2004 and gives no discovery date. This article dates the case to the report.
−54 cm
UNVERIFIED
The retrieved source describes the discovery, not the remedy. How the two halves were brought together is not stated here.
€15 billion
DISPUTED
That figure is the price of the train fleet, not the price of the error. The trains work and are still in service. Using it inverts the fact.
$20.5 billion
DISPUTED
The dollar conversion of the same fleet price, carried by the same headlines. Same inversion, different currency.
1,300 m
SINGLE-SOURCE
Traced to a search summary and never confirmed at a source. A summary that says a distance exists is not a record of the distance.
2.2 µm
UNVERIFIED
Absent from NASA and from the independent source. Found only in generated content farms whose page titles are full sentences.
Nine figures · scroll to travel
Episode 01 · 9 min 36 s · five cases
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.
Subscribe for the next verified case — not the version everyone repeats.
Chapters
- Mars Climate Orbiter 00:25
- Laufenburg bridge 02:42
- SNCF platforms 04:13
- Vasa 05:37
- Hubble mirror 07:22
Each chapter has its own dossier
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.
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