Past exam of the physics A course of the University of Cambridge 2012 Paper 1 Section A 4 Solution 2026-10-20
For radiative temperature uncertainty after background subtraction, write , so and . The two absolute uncertainties are both . If they are independent standard uncertainties,If the percentages instead denote absolute error bounds, linear worst-case propagation gives 0.56%. With correlation coefficient , the standard-uncertainty result is ; subtraction makes positive common errors partly cancel. The independence convention is therefore an assumption, not information supplied by the percentages.