- #1
kelly0303
- 580
- 33
Hello! I have a system described by ##y=ax##, where a is the parameter I want to extract and y is the stuff I measure (we can assume that I can measure one instance of y without any uncertainty). x is a parameter I can control experimentally but it has an uncertainty associated to it. In a simplified form (but enough for my question), x is the position of a particle (classically) in contact with a thermal bath at temperature T. For example we can assume that the energy of the particle is ##kx^2/2##, where k is a known constant and for each measurement of y, x has a different x, where the probability of an x is given by the probability of having that given energy based on a Boltzman distribution at temperature T. I am not sure if this is a statistical uncertainty or not. I would say it is, because if I measure many y values, I can narrow down the true y value (if I assume I have Gaussian and not thermal noise, that would go down as ##1/\sqrt{N}##, where N is the number of measurements, right?), but I wanted to make sure this makes sense.