![]() But the number names billion, trillion themselves (here with other meaning than in the first chapter) are not names of the orders of magnitudes, they are names of "magnitudes", that is the numbers 1,000,000,000,000 etc. It can be seen that the order of magnitude is included in the number name in this example, because bi- means 2 and tri- means 3, and the suffix -illion tells that the base is 1,000,000. ![]() The table shows what number the order of magnitude aim at for base 10 and for base 1,000,000. The different decimal numeral systems of the world use a larger base to better envision the size of the number, and have created names for the powers of this larger base. The ancient Greeks ranked the nighttime brightness of celestial bodies by 6 levels in which each level was twice as bright as the nearest weaker level of brightness, so that the brightest level is 5 orders of magnitude brighter than the weakest, which can also be stated as a factor of 32 times brighter. Other orders of magnitude may be calculated using bases other than 10. This is the reasoning behind significant figures: the amount rounded by is usually a few orders of magnitude less than the total, and therefore insignificant. Two numbers of the same order of magnitude have roughly the same scale: the larger value is less than ten times the smaller value. If they differ by two orders of magnitude, they differ by a factor of about 100. If two numbers differ by one order of magnitude, one is about ten times larger than the other. Orders of magnitude are generally used to make very approximate comparisons. This is useful for getting an intuitive sense of the comparative scale of familiar objects. ![]() The entries in the table below lead to lists of items that are of the same order of magnitude in various units of measurement. Such differences in order of magnitude can be measured on the logarithmic scale in "factors of ten" or decades (meaning "power of ten", not "10 years"). In its most common usage, the amount being scaled is 10 and the scale is the exponent being applied to this amount. ![]() An order of magnitude is the class of scale or magnitude of any amount, where each class contains values of a fixed ratio to the class preceding it. ![]()
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