This experiment measures the specific heat of three unlabelled metal samples by the method of mixtures: heat the sample in a boiling-water bath, drop it into a calorimeter of cold water, read the final temperature. One equation, one unknown. Your answer comes out about 17% too low.
What makes this one different
The hidden error here is the cup itself. The calorimeter, the stirrer and the thermometer all sit in that same water and warm up with it, so part of the heat the sample gave up went into them. A student who charges all of it to the water always gets an answer that is too low — never too high.
But the point of the page is the way out. In viscosity by Stokes’ law we removed the error with theory, and in momentum on an air track with symmetry. Neither is available here: you do not know the cup’s heat capacity and you have no formula for it.
You do not need one. It is enough to run the same method on something whose answer you already know — drop in hot water instead of a sample. The specific heat of water is known, so the same equation now hands you the cup’s heat capacity, and that corrects every sample. This is calibration against a known standard, the most transferable skill in the whole laboratory: whenever you doubt your method, try it on a control.
The Python section shows a second, completely separate route that recovers both numbers from the slope and intercept of a graph, without a single calibration run. When two unrelated methods land on the same answer, that answer is no longer luck.