NOTE: A newer version of this article with updated link syntax is at Orders of magnitude/Temp. When all the individual orders of magnitude articles are moved to the new syntax then the temp version of this article will be pasted back here and any edits made here may be lost.
If you want to look at the length aspect alone and get a feel for how different orders of magnitude compare with examples of physical world, go to this length comparison Page.I pasokan believe that this complements the individual pages. Please leave your comments on the talk page
An order of magnitude is a factor of ten. For example, two numbers are said to differ by "3 orders of magnitude" if one is 1000 times as large as the other. Orders of magnitude are quite easily and commonly described through the use of scientific notation and powers of ten.
One way of categorising things in the physical world is by their size. The pages below contain lists of items that are of the same order of magnitude in length, area, volume, or mass. This is useful for getting an intuitive sense of the comparative size of things and the overall scale of the universe.
In the following table the different quantities are lined up so that the following are in the same row: length and the time taken by light to cross that length, area of a square and the length of one side, volume of a cube and the area of one face, mass of some water and its volume.
Units used in the table:
- Time: femtosecond (fs), nanosecond (ns), microsecond, (μs), millisecond (ms), second (m), hour (hr), day (dy), year (yr)
- Length: nanometre (nm), micrometre (µm), millimetre (mm), centimetre (cm), metre (m), kilometre (km), astronomical unit (AU), light year (LY)
- Area: square metre (m2), hectare (ha), square kilometre (km2)
- Mass: gram (g), kilogram (kg), tonne (t)
- Volume: millilitre (ml), litre (l), cubic metre (m3)
- Energy: electron volt (eV), Joule (J)
See also: SI units, SI prefix, conversion of units