Two Second Memory

I’m reading a book called H₂0: A biography of water by Phillip Ball (2000, Phoenix). I was in a book shop today and happened to see the author’s name and after having read and enjoyed Critical Mass: The Physics of Society by Philip Ball (2004, William Heinemann) I decided to buy it.

After reading a few pages I started to get annoyed with the use of the word billion. That’s a little harsh I hear you say! That’s as may be but the word has no meaning.

The original meaning of the word “… was purposely formed in the 16th c. to denote the second power of a million …” (OED (1989 Oxford University Press)). Wikipedia gives the date of 1475. The problem lies with those wily French mathematicians who changed the meaning of the word such that groups of figures were divided into groups of three not six. And thus we have now what is known as the long and short scales.

The net result of all this, as mentioned above, is that it really has no meaning. So if I say that some thing is a thousand billion, in the long scale it would be 10¹⁵ whereas using the short scale it would be 10¹² (which would be a billion in the long scale, but that’s only confusing the issue).

This becomes even more annoying when well respected magazines like Scientific American use a thousand billion which could be written as a million million (given that the US use the short scale). Scientific American should really now better as it is widely available in many countries using both the long and the short scale. It would only take a change to their style guide to ensure that it is written in an unambiguous way. What’s more given that Scientific American is a science journal so why on earth don’t they use the scientific scientific notation or even better the engineering notation?

Then there is the ISO standard of prefixes which is a fabulous thing. There are even guidelines on how to use them. So instead of me reading the sentence “… one million-billionth of a second.” How about using “… one atto second” (long scale) or “… on femto second”. Now you might not know what these mean but at least you can look them up.

Filed by rgh at 23:48 under Uncategorized
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