Magnitudinality

[eck]

It feels to me like there should be more and better representations for the range of magnitudes known to apply to elements of our universe. One aspect of this which perturbs my thinking somewhat is: At what orders of magnitude should there be representations? Every 10x? Every 2x

Comments

[purpletigron]

Since it's SI, m stands for metre, even in the USA ... it's just that most USA residents don't realise that ;-)

There's a very neat film, which I think was produced by the Open University, called "Powers of Ten" which tries to do exactly this.

[purplecthulhu]

Just on a technical note, superclusters are actually clusters of clusters of galaxies, so are bigger than a normal galaxy cluster.

[kelc42]

Since I have worked primarily with SI units all my life (I have a science and an engineering degree), and do not recall seeing the word metre before, I had to look it up. Obviously from the context I understood the meaning. Who knew there were 2 ways to spell metre/meter. According to this meter is the 'American English' spelling of metre. Yet another example of how Canadians use the 'American' spelling of some words and the 'British' spelling of others (I say we use the 'Canadian' spelling...) I suppose in most cases the abbreviations (m/km/mm) are used, so it limits the opportunities to encounter the different spelling. Looking at a few Canadian government websites I see the 2 are used pretty much interchangeably.

On a side note here is a letter written to the US government trying to persuade them to use metre rather than meter.

I just noticed the LiveJournal spell checker does not like the word 'metre' so I guess we need to write in American here.