The phrase I used is “extraordinarily precise.” When you’re conducting a medical trial of 10,000 patients there’s always a high probability (virtually a certain

The phrase I used is “extraordinarily precise.” When you’re conducting a medical trial of 10,000 patients there’s always a high probability (virtually a certainty) that one measurement will be inaccurate. You can live with this minimal error rate because there’s so much data that a small amount of error doesn’t invalidate the results. If you’re conducting an experiment involving a single asteroid, then every link along the chain of evidence had better be airtight, and validated to a level that wouldn’t be cost-effective or practical in other circumstances. There can’t be a 0.1% or a 1% or a 10% or (god forbid) a 50+% chance that the substance you’re presenting is something other than what you claim it is.