Summary: In order to better understand science, probability, and the statistics we use, we need to understand the units of science and be able to visualize the numbers they deal with. In this, the fourth episode of our first miniseries "What is Science and How Does It Work?", we talk about the metric and imperial systems of measurement, the incredible difference between a single electron and the entire universe, and how to visualize large numbers. Dana even sings us a little song. Find a comfy chair and join us on an amazing adventure. Corrections/Clarifications: When we discussed computer storage, we said that a kilobyte was 1000 bytes. In reality, it's both 1024 bytes (which is 2^10 bytes) and 1000 bytes, depending on the context. For a more unique term you can use kibibyte which is 1024 bytes without question. Of course, the larger question is how 1970's Canada would know about kilobytes and gigabytes. The metric system actually uses kilograms for its standard unit of mass and not the gram. This doesn't affect our discussion much, but it will sound slightly odd to hear the mass of a human measured in grams and not kilograms Links: Our Show Notes for the episode (Imperial vs Metric System, Scientific Notation, SI Prefixes, Visualizing Large Numbers, and Different Sizes and the Universe) All of our issues with the Imperial System are listed in the Additional Notes The Planck system of measurement A list of all the SI prefixes Understanding scientific notation Distances to different astronomical objects in light-seconds, minutes, and years Wikipedia's list of different masses XKCD's post on "What if everyone jumped in the same place at the same time?"
