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Why do you have scientific notation?
Scientific notation makes it easier to express numbers of extremely small or large magnitude. For example, we could either say that something is .00000000068 meters long, or simply use scientific notation to write it as 6.8 x 10-10 meters. There is also an "engineering" notation which is similar to scientific notation, but all exponents are multiples of 3. This is so we can introduce prefixes such as nano, micro, kilo, giga, etc. The number 573000 would be written as 5.73 x 105 in scientific notation, and 573 x 103 in engineering notation.
Is a megabyte the largest unit of measurement?
For measuring computer storage (memory), both gigabyte and terabyte are larger. See related link for more prefixes. Note that there has been some confusion with using the 'metric' prefixes with memory. Originally, a kilobyte was 1024 bytes (not 1000), and a megabyte was (1024 x 1024 = 1048,576 bytes)
Why do you use engineering notation in electronics rather than scientific notation?
Sometimes engineers use either scientific or engineering notation, although you are correct that most of the time engineering notation is used. The reason for this the use if greek letter prefixes for quantities. Very often large and small quantities are expressed as micro, mega, giga, nano, and so on. These terms relate to engineering notation in multiples of 1000 or 1/1000. It is a very convenient shorthand not only in writing but also while speaking.Read more: Why_in_engineering_you_use_engineering_notation_instead_of_scientific_notation
Why do you think we have engineering notation AND scientific notation?
Engineering notation changes every factor of 1000, so it corresponds to the SI prefixes (and names of large numbers). So 3 x 10^8 m/s becomes 300 x 10^6 m/s, or 300 megameters per second (or 300 million meters per second).
How do you write numbers in scientific and engineering notation?
Scientific notation is normally used for numbers that are either far to large or far to small to be written conveniently in decimal notation.A,BFor example the Earth's mass is approximately: 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000,000.0 kgIn scientific notation this would be written as:5.9736 x 1024 kg.In normalised scientific notation numbers are written in the form:A,Ba x 10nWhere:a is a number between 1 and 10n is a positive or negative whole number.In engineering notation, the n value is commonly in the form of multiples of 3. In this way the number will always explicitly match the corresponding SI prefixes.BFor example a distance of 50,000 m would be written as:Scientific Notation: 5 x 104 mEngineering notation: 50 x 103 mIn this example 103 corresponds to the SI prefix "kilo"C as such the engineering notation could be directly described verbally as "fifty kilometres" whereas scientific notation yields the much more unwieldy "five times ten to the power four metres" which is much less intuitively easy to understand, even though it is exactly the same distance.Guidance on converting to and from scientific notation is given in the related links. Specifically References A and B.References:A Scientific notation - Engineering Maths Help from the 'mathcentre' Academic Website.B Scientific notation: Wikipedia Entry.C List of SI prefixes: Wikipedia Entry.Please see related links.
