if the zeroes of 0.000005 is not significant then might as well throw em all in the trash and put it as 5
So, 0.000005 is = 5 which is obviously wrong
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Can someone explain to me what perspective I need to understand them? And also why my mindset is wrong
In: Mathematics
Significant figures become more obvious when written in scientific notation
0.000005 is 5×10^-6 so its pretty clear that you have a single significant digit (5) but the leading zeros are still important for scaling. Consider a real measurement like kg, 0.000005 would be 5 milligrams which is clearly only 1 sig fig.
Now if you had something like 0.000005000 that’d be 5000 micrograms and if you were measuring it with something that actually had microgram levels of precision then you have 4 sig figs and would write is as 5.000×10^-6 to denote that its actually 5.000 and not like 4.9 or even 5.014.
You need to be careful about including leading or trailing zeros that aren’t actually part of your measurement precision, if we say a ship weighs 1000 tons the precision there is really in terms of +- 0.5 tons (or maybe more) so it’d be misleading to say it weighs 1,000,000.000 kg because you don’t have precision down to the kg let alone fractional kilograms
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