A few years ago, I was reading about a contest open to everyone. The question was something like : if you were on a desert island, with unlimited natural resources, and access to a book with the most accurate values of properties for various natural things (i.e. gravitational acceleration on...
Not sure if extremes is the right word, but I've always wondered about the "negligeable" part of physics.
1) For example, water is commonly called incompressible, but it does compress some. Looking at wikipedia it says its compressibility is 4.6 E -10, whereas rock is about 3 E -10. So why do...