Tiny Numbers in Science
Even smaller numbers are often found in science, which are so small that they are not easily dealt with using fractions. Scientific notation was created to handle very small and very large numbers.
Examples of small numbers describing everyday real-world objects are:
- size of a bit on a computer hard disk
- feature size of a structure on a microprocessor chip
- wavelength of green light: 5.5 × 10-7 m
- period of a 100 MHz FM radio wave: 1 × 10-8 s
- time taken by light to travel one meter: roughly 3 × 10-9 s
- radius of a hydrogen atom: 2.5 × 10-11 m
- the charge on an electron: roughly 1.6 × 10-19 C (negative)
Other small numbers are found in particle physics and quantum physics:
- size of the atomic nucleus of a lead atom: 7.1 × 10-15 m
- the Planck length: 1.6 × 10-35 m
Read more about this topic: Small Number
Famous quotes containing the words tiny, numbers and/or science:
“The tiny fish enjoy themselves
in the sea.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“I had a feeling that out there, there were very poor people who didn’t have enough to eat. But they wore wonderfully colored rags and did musical numbers up and down the streets together.”
—Jill Robinson (b. 1936)
“May we not assure ourselves that whatever woman’s thought and study shall embrace will thereby receive a new inspiration, that she will save science from materialism, and art from a gross realism; that the “eternal womanly shall lead upward and onward”?”
—Louisa Parsons Hopkins, U.S. scientist and author. As quoted in The Fair Women, ch. 16, by Jeanne Madeline Weimann (1981)