Order of approximation
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 | This article may be confusing or unclear to readers. (March 2016) |
In science, engineering, and other quantitative disciplines, order of approximation refers to formal or informal expressions for how accurate an approximation is.
Colloquial usage
These terms are also used colloquially by scientists and engineers to describe phenomena that can be neglected as not significant (e.g. "Of course the rotation of the Earth affects our experiment, but it's such a high-order effect that we wouldn't be able to measure it." or "At these velocities, relativity is a fourth-order effect that we only worry about at the annual calibration.") In this usage, the ordinality of the approximation is not exact, but is used to emphasize its insignificance; the higher the number used, the less important the effect. The terminology, in this context, represents a high level of precision required to account for an effect which is inferred to be very small when compared to the overall subject matter. The higher the order, the more precision is required to measure the effect, and therefore the smallness of the effect in comparison to the overall measurement.