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stuff of legends wrote:i would prefer physics over chem any day (wanting to be an astrophysicist), but we have a crap physics teacher who decides to round the acceleration due to gravity to 10 instead of 9.8 to do his calculations and he gets off track every 2.6 seconds. So they are painfully slow lessons and you learn crap all. That's if you don't know what your doing already.

hah

if your going to be doing astrophysics you should get used to it, for example, pi = 4 as zer says

may as well call that 1, because, in the grand scale of the universe (astrophysical scale) the difference between multiplying between 3/4 and 1 is negligible lol

also, im guessing your doing high school physics if ur using g = 9.8

just because it can be negligible does not mean it should be for a course that has a large scale.
and no not high school, the curriculum requires it to be 9.8 and not ten.

I think I was using 9.8 for gravity as well when I was in college, but it's been over a decade, & physics and I didn't agree; heard funner stories from friends in their chemistry classes

Physics?? Chemistry?? They're boring and not romantic at all.

stuff of legends wrote:[-X just because it can be negligible does not mean it should be for a course that has a large scale.
and no not high school, the curriculum requires it to be 9.8 and not ten.

thats the whole point, it IS negligible, so its ignored lol

tbh im surprised, usually find g stated as 9.81, or 9.807 @ 45degrees lattitude & sea level lol

Zeratul wrote:that sounds almost like some place in the US that made it a rule to define pi to be 4...

well, not really.
i mean, when doing high-school phisics, it's the principle that counts. you can take g to mean anything you want (heck, if you can take a planet any mass (well, to be perfectly anal, density) you want, and have the suitable g as a consequence), or you can just take g to be a blank paremeter, with no inherent numerical value whatsoever.
now, G, that's totally different. that's the universal gravity constant, and that you can't tamper with (rather, you have to understand the consequence of tampering with it). nor you can with PI (although, taking PI to be 4 isn't much worse than taking it to be 3.14, formally speaking).

3.14 is exact to the second decimal. 4 isnt even exact to the whole number.

3.14 is exact enough for certain uses, 4 is exact enough for others.