Why write numbers in scientific notation
understanding physics will you describe in great detail how the world works. however, the characteristics of the worldspan an enormous range of numbers. the mass of an electron is 0.911 (incredibly the mass of the sun is 1,989,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000 (incredibly if you hadto write, interpret, or use these numbers as written, you could very easily end up making a minor math error. scientificnotation was invented to easily express numbers that are too large or too small to be conveniently written in decimal form. the advantages of scientific notation are it 1) is compact, 2) articulate significant figures, and 3) works with numbersof any size. the traditional format for numbers written in scientific notation is 10is where is a number between 1 and 10 and is an integer (either positive or negative). for the examples above, the mass of an electron can be written as 9.1110-31and the mass of the sun can be written as 1.9891030