Why do you suppose we minimized the sum of the squares of the residuals in the "falling bodies" lab rather than just minimizing the sum of the residuals without squaring? (in our case the residual is the "y" distance from o data point to the fit curve).

Aballet student who learns with the of his instructor is demonstrating learning.

Light from a sodium lamp passes through a diffraction grating that has 1000 slits per millimeter. the interference pattern is viewed on a screen 1.000 m behind the grating. the first (m = 1) two bright yellow fringes that are visible are 0.7288 m and 0.7300 m from the central maximum. what are the wavelengths of these two fringes?

Need only answer if you think you know it