Showing posts with label Scientific Notation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scientific Notation. Show all posts

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Write 0.00000000012 in Scientific Notation

Suppose the distance from Earth to Planet-X is 4,502,233,434,224,445,657,213,455,467,634,345,654,634,234,333,345,547,665,754,234,647,673,535,345 light years away and you needed to write that distance 20 times in various places in a book report. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to "abbreviate" it? Scientific notation is how we can write numbers in a "shorter" way. In this case we could round the number to say 4,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, but we'd still have deal with all of those zeros. Using scientific notation we could write the distance as "approximately 4.5 x 10^72" and capture the size of the number without needing to write all of its digits. Here is how it works:




So... 0.00000000012 = 1.2x10^-10