Words of wisdom from my college slide rule instructor:

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"A calculator is a thing that will give you the wrong answer to 15 decimal places."
 
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Well technically, it will give you the right answer to 15 decimal places as long as you know what to make it do. After 15 decimal places, it will give you the wrong answer due to floating point errors.
 
Calculators don't have all the information that you do. If you divide 1 by 3. It doesn't know if you're giving it measurements or just numbers, so it's going to give you lots of decimal places.