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How big is a billion?

  • 10-10-2010 11:03am
    #1
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 7,225 ✭✭✭


    When we are talking about billions of euros, which billion are we using?

    Is it a) 1,000,000,000
    b) 1,000,000,000,000

    Because as I understand it, there are two different systems, one which uses a, and the other one b.


Comments

  • Registered Users Posts: 2,481 ✭✭✭Fremen


    The one with twelve zeros after it (a million million) is an old-fashioned English term. The modern convention is to name numbers in multiples of 1,000.

    So:

    1,000 - thousand
    1,000,000 - million
    1,000,000,000 - billion
    1,000,000,000,000 - trillion
    1,000,000,000,000,000 - quadrillion

    You can see what these numbers look like in terms of cash here:
    http://www.funny-potato.com/trillion-dollars.html


  • Registered Users Posts: 12,945 ✭✭✭✭bnt


    I remember, from school days, that they wanted to call 10^9 a Milliard, but this has pretty much gone now and everyone uses the American system.

    From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.

    — Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut



  • Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators Posts: 1,846 Mod ✭✭✭✭Michael Collins


    Just on a more qualitative level, I suspect a lot of people are wondering just how much a billion is due to all these "billions" we keep hearing on the news regarding bailing out the banks etc. I heard this way of showing just how big a billion is:

    Imagine you get 1 euro every second, after 12 days you'd have 1 million, but it'd be 33 years before you'd have 1 billion!


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,038 ✭✭✭sponsoredwalk


    here is also a historical difference between billions, trillions, and so
    forth. Americans use billion to mean one thousand million (1,000,000,000),
    whereas in the UK, until the latter part of the 20th century, it was used
    to mean one million million (1,000,000,000,000).
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences
    :rolleyes:
    Now it's [latex] 1 \ x \ 10^9 \ = \ 1 , \ 000 , \ 000 , \ 000 [/latex].

    You'll have to accept an apology from Richard Feynman on this particular
    question:
    I wish to apologize for something that is not my responsibility: Physicists
    and scientists all over the world have been measuring things in different
    units, and causing an enormous amount of complexity. As a matter of
    fact, nearly a third of what you have to learn[SIZE=-1] 1[/SIZE] consists of different ways
    of measuring the same thing, and I apologize for it. It's like having money
    in francs, and pounds, and dollars... with the advantage over money that
    the ratios don't change, as time goes on.

    For example, in the measurement of energy, the unit we use here is the
    joule (J), and a watt (W) is a joule per second. But there are a lot of
    other systems to measure energy. There are at least three different ones
    for engineers, which I have listed here.[SIZE=-1]2[/SIZE]

    The physicists do something else when they want to talk about the energy
    of a single atom, instead of the energy of a gross amount of material.
    The reason is, of course, that a single atom is such a small thing that to
    talk about its energy in joules would be inconvenient. But instead of taking
    a definite unit in the same system (like 10[SIZE=-1]-20 [/SIZE]J), they have unfortunately
    chosen, arbitrarily, a funny unit called an electronvolt (eV), which is the
    energy needed to move an electron through a potential difference of one
    volt, and that turns out to be about 1.6 10[SIZE=-1]-19 [/SIZE]J. I am sorry that we do
    that, but that's the way it is for the physicists.

    The chemists also talk about the energy per atom. Since they don't use
    the atoms individually but large blobs of them, in cans and barrels, they've
    chosen a certain number of atoms as a unit. This number of things is
    called a mole (mol), and it is 6.023 10[SIZE=-1]23 [/SIZE] objects. The more precise
    definition, which is now correct or soon[SIZE=-1] 3[/SIZE] will be, is that one mole of
    carbon-12 atoms has a mass of exactly 12 grams. A mole is just a certain
    number of things. So, instead of giving the energy per atom, the chemists
    give the energy per mole. It's good, therefore, to know how much energy
    is a mole of electronvolts. In other words, if each atom had one
    electronvolt of energy, a large number of atoms would have a reasonable
    amount of joules, namely 96500 joules per mole. Incidentally, a mole of
    electrons has a total charge of 96500 coulombs (C); these numbers are
    equal for a reason you have to figure out.[SIZE=-1]4[/SIZE][SIZE=-1]
    [/SIZE]
    Now, there is an additional unit that the physical chemists use, the
    kilocalorie per mole (kcal/mol), and 23 of those is an electronvolt per
    atom. [ 23 kcal = 96500 J ]

    Finally, unfortunately, you have another system for measuring masses.
    The mass of an atom, from a chemist's point of view, is given by the mass
    of a mole of these atoms. For example, the mass of carbon-12 is called 12
    "atomic mass units" (u), because a mole of carbon-12 "weighs" 12 grams
    (or rather "has 12 grams of mass"). One atomic mass unit represents one
    gram for every mole of objects, one gram per mole. We can measure that
    in electronvolts also. "You can't measure mass in electron volts!"[SIZE=-1] 5[/SIZE] Sure
    you can, because of the relation E = mc[SIZE=-1]2 [/SIZE]... It is useful to know how
    much energy corresponds to the consumption of one atomic mass unit of
    material: That turns out to be about 931 million electronvolts (MeV).

    Incidentally, the rest mass of a proton is 938 MeV, while the rest mass of
    an electron corresponds to 0.511 MeV. The number 938 differs from 931,
    because a proton has a mass of about 1.008 amu.

    I am sorry about the confusion produced by all these systems of units.
    I left out, obviously, a large number of different things. For example,
    when measuring luminous[SIZE=-1] 6[/SIZE] energy, the lumen (lm) is used, which
    corresponds to about 1.5 mW of power in the "most visible" light, around
    5500 Å (ångströms). It's all very annoying, but don't worry about it now.

    When you need to measure light, just look up in a book what a lumen is.
    That's an unfortunate fact that we measure things in a whole series of
    different kinds of units. This causes a lot of confusion.
    It's too bad, but I have already apologized, and there is nothing else
    I can do...
    http://www.numericana.com/answer/feynman.htm


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