Talk:Order of magnitude

"1 E* J" series and others...

Interested parties should see the List of energies in joules, which I just created before coming across this (these) page(s). (See also Talk:List of energies in joules.) I should have followed the "Orders of magnitude" link first! Anyway, the information there should probably be refactored into Orders of magnitude (energy). There are also collections of pages for length, area, volume, time, etc., as pointed out in earlier discussions. In my opinion, all of these should be redirected to the relevant "Order" pages to avoid future confusion and duplication of effort. - dcljr 09:02, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I prefer the collections (or "chains") of pages 1 E6 m, 1 E7 m, etc. That is how this area of WP began originally. The "Orders of magnitude (foo)" pages began as either an overview or a botched attempt at simplifying the main "Orders of magnitude" page. I would suggest we look into restoring the "chain" pages, a number of which have been turned into redirects. -- Tarquin 12:06, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Is it a question of one or the other? Some of these lists would be best split up chain-like, others might be a little too thin for this. Moreover I'd like to see these chains have larger links—thousands rather than tens would probably be better. In fact, some parts of a chain could be bigger, and other parts smaller (I'd suggest, 10, 1000 or 10⁶ⁿ for interger, n). Further, it would be nice if they could have titles written in English rather than some kind of computer code (see Talk:1 E-3 s#Title). Jɪmp 07:03, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Contradictory section "Working Out the Orders of Magnitude"

This oddly worded section (which I boldly deleted) gave the order of magnitude of 340 as 3. This contradicts the earlier "take the log and truncate" method which would give trunc(2.53) or 2. Thoughts on this? Restore it if you liked it (and don't tell me please). Caltrop 01:19, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Torque

Orders of magnitude of torque? I could use that. --Remi0o 09:25, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Text taken from another source

It looks like some of the text in this article was taken from another source, which had chapters. There's an unchanged reference to "the first chapter" in the Non-decimal orders of magnitude section.

Radiation

How about the order of magnitude for radiation? Magniloquent 23:55, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Fixed! (only 3 years late!) SteveBaker (talk) 19:10, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Order of magnitude??

In Computer Science the order of magnitude often refers to powers of 2 or more commonly powers of n where n is any integer. I my humble opinion this entire article needs the help of someone who understands number theory. --209.216.184.118 (talk) 00:55, 9 February 2008 (UTC) Sorry, I wasn't logged in. --DRoll (talk) 00:57, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Order of magnitude of zero

Such a dumb question but ...

$lim_{x \to 0}x = - \infty$

so it would seem to me that the order of magnitude of zero would generally be taken as undefined. Am I right? Is it considered to be −∞? Surely the order of magnitude of zero is not zero ... right? JIMp _talk·cont 23:40, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

You are correct. Orders of magnitude are associated with positive numbers. Xihr (talk) 03:40, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

So, like zero isn't a positive number? Is it negative? 88.151.26.71 (talk) 00:26, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Between two stools

This page is terrible. It seems like it is trying to find a common ground between readers with little or no mathematical background and someone with a modicum of understanding of the language of mathematics. It needs to decide which class of reader it is aimed at. My preference would be someone who does not have a mathematical background. With that in mind the first two paragraphs could be much better summarised as something like: ``Most commonly, when two quantities are compared as having an order-of-magnitude difference, it is taken to mean that the two quantities involved differ by a factor of about ten. Logarithmic scales and questions of which base is most likely being invoked by the qualifier "order-of-magnitude" can be introduced, but the page should try to introduce such concepts in a logical way.

As it is this page has no cohesion, doesn't know who its target audience is, and (to agree with another comment here) has sections that seem to be lifted verbatim from other sources without any consideration of the expository nature of this medium. If the author wishes merely to regurgitate what he has learned from other sources, he should at least make some effort to present that in a way that will be clear to those who do not have the appropriate textbooks to hand, and whose motivation in looking up this page is to expand their knowledge rather than merely read a poorly-constructed precis of someone's course notes. 88.151.26.71 (talk) 00:51, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

• Actually, I find it quite appropriate that it addresses the concept in simple terms in places for the broadest audience, and then fills in with a little more detail for those who remember their high school mathematics for others. -- Ithacagorges 22:45, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Octillion, not "Gazillion"

I believe the correct number for 10^27 is octillion, not gazillion. I'll let someone else fill in the details. -- Ithacagorges 03:05, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Yeah - we have someone trying to be funny here...we call them "vandals". SteveBaker (talk) 14:40, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Redlinks

I have removed redlinks from the associated template Template:Orders of magnitude wide, listed here to encourage someone to start them:

• Orders of magnitude (angular frequency)
• Orders of magnitude (concentration)
• Orders of magnitude (current)
• Orders of magnitude (momentum)

This makes the template more consistent with its tall version, they can be re-added when the articles exist. -84user (talk) 19:04, 16 March 2011 (UTC)