You may be amused to note that in the USA (yeah, we're screwed up here) we use a comma to separate thousands and a period to indicate the decimal point. Therefore 100,000 is 1x10^5 while 100.000 is 1.00000x10^2 . Scientific notation does make a lot more sense, and I should have used it in the first place. Note always significant figures (of which you used five).
If you'll allow a '^' mark to represent 'digits after this until a space or carriage return or line feed shall be considered superscripts and/or mathematical exponents'.
Just for grins ... 100,000 doesn't exist. It's either 100,00 OR 100.000 ... like a million would be 1.000.000
As an aside, what's wrong with one hundred to three decimal places? While it may seem unusual in your profession, not everything is pounds and pence.
So I think your math is subject to a little continental confusion here.
If I'm correct your 99.999% would be the same as our 99,999%
As far as I'm concerned, neither suggests that the total is 100.000 (your 100,000).
Nope. To claim accuracy, what you have done reading with 99.999% (Or 99,999%) accuracy implies that you have done at least one hundred thousand (shall I just write it out instead) readings and one was wrong. Or two hundred thousand and two were wrong. If you have only done one thousand readings and none were wrong, then you cannot claim five figures of accuracy.
This ain't so much science as middle-school math. 4th form, perhaps, to you.
You obviously live by the head, only believe what science can prove. I don't.
Science is not my god. Science has its use, but it is just a means with lots of limitations, that says whatever is beyond their scope isn't true. To me that is too narrow-minded. But to each their own.
Actually, I tried living by my bollocks for awhile, and you can guess how well that went.
Science is not anybody's god. It is merely a method for looking at what is and trying to understand it through the evidence presented.
The concept 'what is' does indeed include everything that is - And occasionally showing the world that, um, "Actually, that is not, you are merely fooling yourself". I have been fooled, and I will be again, and yet I still apply science to much of what I do. It is not science that fails - It is the people.
S.