4 ms·
I find the "billionth of a metre thick" phrasing painful, but I guess it's better than if they'd written that it was "a trillionth of a kilometre thick"
by huxley 11y ago
I find the "billionth of a metre thick" phrasing painful, but I guess it's better than if they'd written that it was "a trillionth of a kilometre thick"
- cjfont 11y agoThey can't be flaunting around big words like nanometer, it might discourage a layperson from reading the article.
- huxley 11y agoDecent point, but most people familiar with metric would work with smaller units than metres and for those unfamiliar with metric, describing it as a billionth of a yard would still sound like a pretty peculiar. I think describing it as a minute fraction of an inch or centimetre would still be pretty accessible without having to get people to visualize a nanometre.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sageikosa 11y agoRight, I thought the usual layperson speak was to compare it to the thickness of human hair or a spider web.
- Florin_Andrei 11y agoBTW, it's not even 1 billionth of a metre thick. It's 200 nm. That's 0.2 microns. That's 2 * 10^-7. It's 0.2 of a millionth. They should have just said 0.2 microns instead. It carries just as much actual meaning for the layperson, and it's a lot easier to parse if you are scientifically literate.
- nitid_name 11y agoI thought convention in SI units was to drop down a level when at less than 1 of a unit..?
- lytfyre 11y agoA pretty common approach (at least in Canada) is to use prefixes at intervals of 1000 - mm, m, km and then larger unit to one decimal for large values - 700m as 0.7km, 0.9l instead on 900ml, and so-on. you'll rarely see cl, dg, or hm used here.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoUm, 1 billionth of a meter is 1 nm. Saying it's 200 nm (like the paper says) is very different from saying it's 1 billionth of a meter (like the linked article incorrectly says).
- NamTaf 11y agoThough it's almost unheard of now, a british billion = 1000 * a british million. In that context it does hold, being 2 british billionths of a metre thick. That said, here we all bascially use the American 'billion' because it makes a more logical approach and allows for dealing with larger numbers more easily.
- beobab 11y agoI thought it used to be: a british billion is a million million i.e. 1,000,000,000,000. Thus a british billion is 1000 * an american billion. Nowadays we use the american billion of 1,000,000,000. Pretty sure we all agree that a million is a thousand thousand.
- dang 11y agoOK, we've replaced that with "200 nm". Let's stay on topic now.