In my experience as a physicists many things are perfectly fine even with single precision. This is especially true if you're dealing with experiments, because

In my experience as a physicists many things are perfectly fine even with single precision. This is especially true if you're dealing with experiments, because other errors are typically much larger. To give you an example from my line of work (optical communication). We use high speed ADCs and DACs which have effective number of bits of around 5. While you can't do DSP with 6bit resolution, anything above 12 bits is indistinguishable. This is in fact used by the people designing the circuits for the DSP used in real systems. They are based on fixed point calculations and run on around 9 bits or so. While other fields might have higher precision needs just remember that when you interact with the real world, your ADCs will likely not have more that 16bit resolution (even if very slow), so you're unlikely to need many more bits than this.