Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Ronna And Quetta

It gives the very technical geek weenies (like me) great pleasure to hear the announcement of the next number prefixes.  I started out at Wright State University in the era of kilobytes, which became megabytes, then gigabytes, and now terabytes are common.  The prefixes peta, exa, zetta, and yotta take us all the way up to 10 to the 24th power (septillion), but the new prefixes, ronna and quetta (pronounced with a "kw" sound), take us up the 10 to the 30th power.  Ronto and quecto take us down to 30 zeroes after the decimal point.  The last prefixes added were back in 1991, so it was about time.

The Earth's mass is around 6 ronnagrams and the electron's mass is about 1 rontogram.

How did we live so long without these?




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