An order of magnitude is the class of scale or magnitude of any amount, where each class contains values of a fixed ratio to the class preceding it. In its most common usage, the amount being scaled is 10 and the scale is the (base 10) exponent being applied to this amount. Such differences in order of magnitude can be measured on the logarithmic scale in "factors of ten" or decades (as meaning "power of ten", not the term "10 years"). The entrie...
more
An order of magnitude is the class of scale or magnitude of any amount, where each class contains values of a fixed ratio to the class preceding it. In its most common usage, the amount being scaled is 10 and the scale is the (base 10) exponent being applied to this amount. Such differences in order of magnitude can be measured on the logarithmic scale in "factors of ten" or decades (as meaning "power of ten", not the term "10 years"). The entries in the table below lead to lists of items that are of the same order of magnitude in various units of measurement. This is useful for getting an intuitive sense of the comparative scale of familiar objects.
Orders of magnitude are generally used to make very approximate comparisons. If two numbers differ by one order of magnitude, one is about ten times larger than the other. If they differ by two orders of magnitude, they differ by a factor of about 100. Two numbers of the same order of magnitude have roughly the same scale: the larger...
less
