Scientific prefixes, list

The International System of Units was devised to facilitate communication between scientific and engineering disciplines. Using SI units is highly recommended because it minimizes errors that arise from complicated units conversions. The International System of Units is based on seven base units (Table 2.1). Decimal multiples of these units and derived units are named using the prefixes listed in Table 2.2. 

Chemists frequently work with measurements that are very large or very small. A mole, for example, contains 602,213,670,000,000,000,000,000 particles, and some analytical techniques can detect as little as 0.000000000000001 g of a compound. For simplicity, we express these measurements using scientific notation thus, a mole contains 6.0221367 X 10 particles, and the stated mass is 1 X 10 g. Sometimes it is preferable to express measurements without the exponential term, replacing it with a prefix. A mass of 1 X 10 g is the same as 1 femtogram. Table 2.3 lists other common prefixes. 

Scientific measurements are expressed in the metric system. As you know, this is a decimal-based system in which all of the units of a particular quantity are related to one another by factors of 10. The more common prefixes used to express these factors are listed in Table 1.2 (page 7). 

The metric system is a decimal system, based on powers of 10. Table 2.5 is a list of the prefixes for the various powers of 10. Between scientific notation and the prefixes shown below, it is very simple to identify, name, read, and understand 36 decades of power of any given base or derived unit. 

The advantage of the SI system is that it is a measuring system based on a decimal system. With calculations written in groups of ten, results can be easily recorded as something called scientific notation. There are written prefixes that indicate exponential values as well. Some of these are listed in Table 2.2 which lists terms used in scientific notation. 

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