Really Big Numbers

I’ve been thinking about the contrast between knowledge (Latin scientia) and wisdom (Latin sapientia), and I was interested to learn that the Latin verb sciō, meaning “I know” is related to a Greek verb meaning “to cut.” When I think about science, we really do cut things up and down constantly. So I was interested to read the terms petabyte and petaflop in Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal. When I checked the etymology of petabyte in the Oxford English Dictionary, I found a handy explanation of some of the big number prefixes that are making their way into English, prefixes like tera-, peta, and exa-, all of which come from the Greek prefixes tetra-, penta, and hexa-, standing for four, five, and six, respectively. The prefix peta-, as I understand it, stands for a quadrillion.  What does a quadrillion have to do with “five”? A quadrillion is a thousand million million or ten to the fifteenth power, as in ten to the third power raised to the fifth power.  A petaflop, as explained in Reality Is Broken (p. 239), is “one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).” Yi!

As we listen to our lawmakers and political candidates throw around dollar terms (millions, billions, trillions), I guess we should still count our blessings that we are not close to quadrillions in debt.