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Science Stuff: Numbers, Units, and Measurements
I don’t want to get number crazy, but let’s face it — if you want to understand science, you sort of need to get a feel for different numbers. Let me remind you though — we use math and numbers in science, but that’s just because of the data that we collect. All science doesn’t require math (it also doesn’t require English, or drawings, or computers — but they are in there quite a bit anyway).
Really, there are three very important things to understand if you want to grasp the fundamentals of science: scientific notation, units, and scale.
Scientific Notation
Since science is all about building models based on evidence — we pretty much need to collect some data. For the most part, this data involves actual numbers. OK, so how about this? Let’s say we we measure the radius of the Earth (the Greeks did a pretty good job at this a long time ago). If they used units of meters (they didn’t) and did a perfect job (it was good, but not perfect), then they could report the radius as:
Radius = 6,240,000 meters
That’s cool. But you can use the radius of the Earth along with the gravitational constant (Cavendish did this experiment) to find the mass of the Earth in kg. Check this out.
