In the London To Brighton Veteran Car Run, every car in the event is required to
ID: 1869562 • Letter: I
Question
In the London To Brighton Veteran Car Run, every car in the event is required to have been manufactured before 1905. Cars drive a more-or-less straight line course through the English countryside, about 54 miles from London to Brighton. The average speed is less than 20 miles per hour.
This year, they have decided to measure the time it takes each car to finish the trip. You have been given the honor of being appointed as a judge at the Finish Line. It is your job to record the time that each car finishes the race. You know that the race starts at 10:30 AM London time and that London and Brighton are in the same time zone. You have been given a state-of-the-art, laser-controlled clock, accurate to within 1/10000 of a second, with which to compute the elapsed time of each car in the race. When an object passes through the laser beam, the clock reports the time.
Unfortunately, the technicians set up the clock in the wrong place, 100 yards from the actual finish line. You ask them to move it to the correct location, because the incorrect positioning of the clock would result in a
Completely insignificant problem, because you can correct the data with mathematical extrapolationExplanation / Answer
As the clock was initially placed at 100 yards from finish line, the measurement will shift by the time it takes to cross that 100 yards when it would have taken measurements as per finish line. It will be a systematic error as all the cars timing will be increased the by the amount it takes to cross 100 yards for each specific car.