If the equations, and their applications are correct -- then wouldn't such calculated values yield a more accurate answer than measured values?
(Not that very many decimal places in the calculated value may be significant in the real world.)
RF
one would think so, but in reality, everything is just not accurate to so many decimal places.
take a 1k resistor for example, mostly they come in some tolerance from 25-5% So you measure that, well how accurate is your digital (analog??) meter? Calibrated it lately? Fresh batteries? Good leads?
and for 99.9% of the folks in this world, 1K0 resistor that's really 850 - 1K2 or somewhere in between isn't that important. Folks who need that accuracy buy the 1% jobs and pay the premiums.
I can remember much younger students in a class I was in (I was the one with the white hair) amazed that I could finish the circuit labs so quickly. They wanted to know how I could find those exact values specified in the problem (yea like the guy who wrote that text book ever even LOOKED at a standard resistor or cap value chart). They were mortified when I said I just combined components on the fly to get 'close enough' values. Pretty easy with caps and resistors in simple AC/DC circuits. My boards were a bit "ugly" but they worked.
Then they were like, yea but you got all the right answers... and I really didn't know what to tell them (well it was an introductory course).
Mathematicians generally worry about the 397th decimal place, Engineers are ok with PI being 3.1415-ish.