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Why Do Physicists Use Gaussian Error Distributions?
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[QUOTE="Hornbein, post: 6538598, member: 489043"] There are several reasons. The first is that systemic errors lie outside of physics. Everyone knows they are there but there can't really be a theory for that. They are just mistakes and failures. No need to comment on this, because I'd say that 90% of a typical physics experiment is dealing with mistakes and failures. The second is that perfect Gaussian distributions never occur in nature. It's just a useful general model. A sort of folk system has grown up to deal with "outliers." Usually they are simply excluded. If you add up a large number of results of a repeated experiment there is a strong tendency for such sums to have a Gaussian distribution. This happens almost no matter what the experiment is. (I'm not going to go into the exceptions.) The question is how large is large enough. There are tests that can be done as to whether something is close enough to Gaussian or not. [/QUOTE]
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Why Do Physicists Use Gaussian Error Distributions?
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