Engineers use numbers all the time. Sometimes these numbers are really big. Consider power engineers. Power engineers design and build the systems that make and deliver the electricity that lights our homes. They routinely talk in terms that include millions and sometimes billions. Over time, scientists and engineers have invented some nifty words to describe big numbers.
Here’s an example. Your utility company charges you for the number of kilowatt-hours of electricity you use. A kilowatt-hour is 1,000 watts of electricity used for one hour. A kilowatt will light a 100-watt bulb for 10 hours.
In the world of big number words, kilo, or a thousand, is pretty puny. A kilogram only weighs a little more than two-pounds. Utility company generators regularly produce power measured in millions of watts – megawatts. Many nuclear-powered generators have outputs of more than 200 megawatts. Even this is pretty small when you talk about electric power consumption around the world. That stands at just under two terawatts, two trillion watts. Makes your electric bill seem pretty trivial.
Even this isn’t the end of it. An experimental laser getting ready to go into operation will produce pulses that measure more than one petawatt. Now we’ve got a really big number. A million trillion. And there are words to talk about numbers even bigger than this. But not today.
Our number is up, and we’re quitting. See you next time.
Photo: Thomas Hawk/Flickr.com
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Gene Charleton is a science writer at the Texas Engineering Experiment Station and Texas A&M
University in College Station, Texas. He’s been watching and writing about science and technology for more than 30 years. Engineering Works! was born in 2003
as a two-minute radio show on Texas
A&M University’s NPR outlet, KAMU-FM.
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