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In an article for the Mathematical Association of America’s Web site, Frank Morgan answered a question about the smallest and largest things that people can see without microscopes or telescopes. The range is enormous, from a speck of dust to the Andromeda galaxy. But humans seem to live most of their lives in a “zone of comfort” on the scale of perhaps 1/100 foot to 100 feet. On this range of values, at least, there is little need for scientific notation. However, scientists as well as economists, lawmakers, salespeople, contractors, and others use scientific notation to varying degrees. In this activity, we’ll look at a field in which some of the smallest and largest numbers occur as a matter of course. |
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Internet Activity |
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Activity 6.1
Click this link to view your assignment for this activity.
http://go.hrw.com/resources/go_mt/e1/c6/EDOUBLE.PDF |
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Adobe Acrobat Reader
You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open and print the activity. To download the reader, click "Adobe Acrobat Reader" above.
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html |
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Exploration |
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Cambridge University Cosmology
This site deals with cosmology, the study of the beginning, development, and fate of the universe. It displays a timeline that shows some theories of the history of the universe after the “The Big Bang.” (“The Big Bang” theory speculates that the universe began in the sudden expansion of an extremely dense concentration of energy and then matter.) Click on the link and scroll down until you see the illustration, “Chronology of the Universe.” Be careful to distinguish between upper- and lower-case letters. On this diagram, T stands for temperature and t for time. We are interested only in the values of time (t).
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/bb_history.html |
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Frank Morgan’s Math Chat article “From Galaxies To Electrons”
This MAA Online site contains Morgan’s article.
http://www.maa.org/features/mathchat/mathchat_12_3_98.html |
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Ivar Peterson’s MathTrek article “Beyond Extra Large (and Ultra Small)”
This semi-humorous article shows you how to tell the difference between a yoctogram and a zettameter.
http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_7_27_98.html |
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