>>13233482>Nonetheless it all seems very airtight to me.This is the "airtight room" fallacy. There are gaps in the reasoning. For example, why wouldn't the inventors of the metal ruler make copy of the metal ruler appropriate for the hot environment? In fact this is what is done with the metric system. There is a canonical meter made of special material (under lock and key in France) that is the original "ruler" representing a "meter" of which every subsequent ruler is a copy.
Error is inherent to every measurement, it is how you work with that margin of error that makes all the difference. If the science of measurement were so hopeless, there wouldn't have been any chance of landing a rover on Mars. If small measurements beget small errors, a measurement as long as the distance between planets should have been so massive as to make the effort impossible. So commonly what you do it break up the big measurement into smaller measurements.
Statistical analysis breaks down the methodology and makes it easy to understand how to approach any measurement problem to minimize erroneous results, including detecting faulty rulers
