LM 0.07 Less common metric prefixes Collection

0.7 Less common metric prefixes by Benjamin Crowell, Light and Matter  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

0.7 Less common metric prefixes

The following are three metric prefixes which, while less common than the ones discussed previously, are well worth memorizing.

Note that the abbreviation for micro is the Greek letter mu, μ - a common mistake is to confuse it with m (milli) or M (mega).

There are other prefixes even less common, used for extremely large and small quantities. For instance, 1 femtometer= 10^-15 m is a convenient unit of distance in nuclear physics, and 1 gigabyte=`10^9` bytes is used for computers' hard disks. The international committee that makes decisions about the SI has recently even added some new prefixes that sound like jokes, e.g., 1 yoctogram= 10^-24 g is about half the mass of a proton. In the immediate future, however, you're unlikely to see prefixes like “yocto-” and “zepto-” used except perhaps in trivia contests at science-fiction conventions or other geekfests.

self-check: Suppose you could slow down time so that according to your perception, a beam of light would move across a room at the speed of a slow walk. If you perceived a nanosecond as if it was a second, how would you perceive a microsecond?
(answer in the back of the PDF version of the book) 

0.7 Less common metric prefixes by Benjamin Crowell, Light and Matter  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.