Prefixes & Scientific Notation
The numbers we deal with in everyday life are pretty easy to write - 5 miles, 7 kilometers, $80, 20 cm, 10 minutes.
But in physics, we might be working with really big or really small numbers. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is 149,597,870,000 meters. The wavelength of green light is 0.00000054 meters. Who feels like taking the time and space to write numbers like this?
Lucky for us, there are better ways to write them. In this lesson we'll learn how: prefixes and scientific notation. Prefixes are added to the beginning of a unit and scientific notation is a way to re-write a number using powers of 10.
0
:
3
5
Really big and really small numbers
2
:
2
7
Prefixes
4
:
3
0
Scientific notation
1
1
:
1
8
Summary
The numbers we deal with in everyday life are pretty easy to write - 5 miles, 7 kilometers, $80, 20 cm, 10 minutes.
But in physics, we might be working with really big or really small numbers. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is 149,597,870,000 meters. The wavelength of green light is 0.00000054 meters. Who feels like taking the time and space to write numbers like this?
Lucky for us, there are better ways to write them. In this lesson we'll learn how: prefixes and scientific notation. Prefixes are added to the beginning of a unit and scientific notation is a way to re-write a number using powers of 10.
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