Always a fun read: https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Engineers-Astonishing-Wonders-Creators/dp/0345482875
Bob
All this talk of unworldly precision reminds me of a story that sets it all back in context. An overseas visitor checks out a tinsmith’s workshop in Cornwall. “What tolerance do you work to?” “Oh, we don’t work to tolerances”, says the owner of the workshop. “We gets it right, and then it’s near enough”.
The moral of the story is clear. It’s easy to go well beyond the precision required by functionality. The important thing is to get it right. We are still arguing about matters such as bore constriction which can have an impact (in my experience) of up to 2mm (extreme cases!). So precisions of 0.01mm - 200 times better - have to be viewed in that light.
http://www.hdowns.co.uk/library/the-engineer.php reminds us of meaningful pre-metrication units of precision such as the gnat’s knacker…
The Meaning of Life, we are reliably informed, is 42. Presumably 42 +/- the last significant digit, according to normal engineering practice. So somewhere between 41 and 43. But, as revealed in that wholly remarkable book, the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, the big question is: “what is the question”. We need to answer the big questions before getting bogged down in minutiae.
A job we should set Tunborough, when he has some time on his hands, is to determine what level of precision is required to keep a flute within some reasonable level of accuracy, eg +/- 10 cents.
Yes, when it comes to flute bores and the issues of tone and tuning, harmonics, etc., anything much beyond .1mm is theoretical and not really practical (you are not going to notice it). I do think it’s cool that such precision is possible and there are a lot of endeavors that need/benefit from such precision, but wooden flute bores aren’t one of them 
When I measure a flute bore, I try to be accurate to .001" (.05mm), knowing that such fussiness is probably overkill.
The wooden flute offers us so many challenges. Let’s imagine a typical wooden flute made back in London in the 1840s. Probably made by a cottage industry worker in an unheated shed behind the house. It can be cold in London…
Then the poor instrument finds its way to say the goldfields in Ballarat, in 1850’s Victoria, Australia (I’m looking at you, Rudall & Rose #5501). It gets hot in Ballarat, and dry - I know this as I grew up there - so the flute tries to shrink. The bore of the head and barrel cannot shrink, as they are metal lined. (They did crack. Quite dramatically.) The unlined body sections could shrink, and did. But they shrank proportional to their diameter, so the upper body sections shrank more than the lower body sections. So the conical bore is now not just smaller, but also less steep.
Then of course we had tenon collapse due to thread wrapping. #5501 shows evidence of that. So we’ve introduced three choke points in addition to the other distortions.
So let’s just summarise so far…
Head and barrel bores remain at original dimension
Top LH tenon compressed by thread constriction, while subsequent body most shrunk. Botton LH tenon compressed by thread constriction.
RH section body moderately shrunk, and bottom tenon compressed by thread.
Foot least shrunk.
And we obsess over the quality of data we draw from these poor things?