> a lot of our natural experience of the universe is within 3 orders of magnitude of the base units we use. That may be in large part because of the unit prefi

> a lot of our natural experience of the universe is within 3 orders of magnitude of the base units we use. That may be in large part because of the unit prefixes we use. That is we think of these things in 3 orders of magnitudes because our unit prefixes come in three orders of magnitude but not the other way around. I think a much likelier explanation is the fact that many European languages (most importantly French and English) stop naming each decimal order after a thousand. If there was a word for ten-thousand—say fiorthom—but not a hundred-thousand (ten-fiorthom), surely these prefixes would map be multiples of 10⁴ as well.