Research Seminar October 30th: Fabien Grégis (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Cohn Institute) - Error, Accuracy, and the Assessment of Uncertainty in the Measurement of the Fundamental Physical Constants

The adjustments of the physical constants are a crucial collective endeavor in the field of precision physics, initiated by the American spectroscopist Raymond Birge in 1929. I propose to explore two examples in the history of the adjustments which illustrate how error, uncertainty and accuracy are understood in this field. I will explain how physicists have exhibited a tension between precision and accuracy in the assessment of experimental results. I will then show how some of them have proposed, since the 1970s, to resolve this tension by appealing to an epistemology of long-term progress based on the possibility to correct for errors.