Scientific notation review: converting between sci notation and standard form.

Scientific notation review: converting between sci notation and standard form.

In this video, we quickly review the main idea of scientific notation: that large numbers such as 1000 can be written as positive powers of 10 (10^3 in this case), and small numbers such as .001 can be written as negative powers of 10 (10^-3) in this case.

We apply this idea to two examples given in standard form, and we convert to scientific notation. The large number ends up with a positive power of 10, and the small number with a negative power of 10. We include a note here on significant digits, and the fact that trailing zeroes are ambiguous in standard form, but in scientific notation, you can easily tell how many digits were measured. We also point out that it's simple to determine the exponent by just counting the number of times the decimal must shift in order to result in a single nonzero digit before the decimal point.

Finally, we work two examples of numbers given in scientific notation: the speed of light in scientific notation and the diameter of the hydrogen atom in scientific notation. We count decimal places in the opposite direction as before, and we express the large and small numbers in standard form.