New prefixes for the world’s largest and smallest numbers confirmed by vote General Assembly on Weights and Measures (CGPM) Friday at Versailles, France. Suggested prefixes are ronna and quetta for very large numbers and ronto and quecto for very small numbers.
The International System of Units (SI) is the standard that most scientists agree on and underpins all measurements. It sets how very large and small numbers are named, as well as defining things like kilograms and meters.
This naming scheme was last extended in 1991, with the prefix zetta (10twenty one) and yotta (10twenty four) very large zept (10-twenty one) and Yocto (10-twenty four) very small. While there was little reason to use them at the time, they are becoming more useful now due to the growing amount of data generated by the internet, which is projected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025. .
“There’s already a fair amount of speculation in the popular media about what might be beyond Yottabyte,” he says. Richard Brown at the National Physical Laboratory, the UK’s Center for Measurement Standards.
For example, the brontobyte is informally used to represent ten.27 Bytes, but Google’s unit conversion has long changed 1027 Convert bytes to helabytes. But the letters ‘b’ and ‘h’ don’t fit into the SI naming scheme because they’re already used in prefixes or are commonly used in other units, says Brown. . Don’t get too deep into the scientific literature.
Brown helped draft a proposal that was voted on by CGPM member states on Friday. Since there was no objection, the two new prefixes for numbers containing 27 and he 30 zeros became ronna and quetta for large numbers and ronto and quecto for small numbers respectively. .
They will be SI prefixes with immediate effect, but it may take some time for scientists to adopt them in their research.
Some scientists are skeptical about whether they are useful at all. say Mike Merrifield at the University of Nottingham, England.
Brown suggests that Ronto and Kekt have potential uses in radio astronomy, such as measuring the very weak intensities of the cosmic microwave background, the radiation left over from the Big Bang, but astronomers already know non-SI We use Yansky frequently for this purpose, says Merrifield. .
But the benefits of science communication are clear, says Brown. “With these standardized approaches, we will be able to convey meaning better.”
The name may seem random, but Brown says it adheres to strict guidelines. ‘R’ and ‘q’ were the only remaining letters in the English alphabet and were not used in any other prefix. The middle part of the word is a loose translation from Greek or Latin that indicates how many times 1000 must be multiplied. To get to the numbers, he says, and endings, because big prefixes always end with an ‘a’ and small prefixes end with an ‘o’.
As for when larger or smaller prefixes will appear, Brown thinks it will be at least 25 years. “It’s very difficult to predict the future, but I have no doubt that this will give me a long retirement.”
topic: