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Simon Winchester | a History of Precision Engineering and the Making of the Modern World

Hidden Forces

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The Importance of Precision

You could have very precise tools, but be highly inaccurate because you don't have the right theory and how to approach it. A good example is maybe this will be later on in the discussion, but I'm in the making of the Hubble telescope. The mirror, when it was ground, was ground very precisely, but it was inaccurate because it was one-fiftieth of the thickness of a human hair flatter than it should have been. What was it the Mars Rover in 1998? That year was, or 2001, there was a piece of equipment in outer space that was sent by NASA that cost hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars,. And they got one digit off.

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