Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Mosquitoes, common smaller species (about 2.5 milligrams), [53] grain of salt or sand, [54] medicines are typically expressed in milligrams [55] 10 −5 centigram (cg) 1.1 × 10 −5 kg Small granule of quartz (2 mm diameter, 11 milligrams) [56] 2 × 10 −5 kg Adult housefly (Musca domestica, 21.4 milligrams) [57] 10 −4 decigram (dg) 0.27 ...
Clock time and calendar time have duodecimal or sexagesimal orders of magnitude rather than decimal, e.g., a year is 12 months, and a minute is 60 seconds. The smallest meaningful increment of time is the Planck time―the time light takes to traverse the Planck distance, many decimal orders of magnitude smaller than a second. [1]
Conversions between units in the metric system are defined by their prefixes (for example, 1 kilogram = 1000 grams, 1 milligram = 0.001 grams) and are thus not listed in this article. Exceptions are made if the unit is commonly known by another name (for example, 1 micron = 10 −6 metre).
The units kilogram, gram, milligram, microgram, and smaller are commonly used for measurement of mass. However, megagram, gigagram, and larger are rarely used; tonnes (and kilotonnes, megatonnes, etc.) or scientific notation are used instead. The megagram does not share the risk of confusion that the tonne has with other units with the name "ton".
Conversion of units is the conversion of the unit of measurement in which a quantity is expressed, typically through a multiplicative conversion factor that changes the unit without changing the quantity. This is also often loosely taken to include replacement of a quantity with a corresponding quantity that describes the same physical property.
For example, according to the capacitance row of the table, if a capacitor has a capacitance of 1 F in SI, then it has a capacitance of (10 −9 c 2) cm in ESU; but it is incorrect to replace "1 F" with "(10 −9 c 2) cm" within an equation or formula. (This warning is a special aspect of electromagnetism units.
Unit prefixes that are much larger or smaller than encountered in practice are seldom used, albeit valid combinations. In most contexts only a few, the most common, combinations are established. For example, prefixes for multiples greater than one thousand are rarely applied to the gram or metre.
In biological systems, reactions often happen on small scales, involving small amounts of substances, so those substances are routinely described in terms of milliequivalents (symbol: officially mequiv; unofficially but often mEq [2] or meq), the prefix milli-denoting a factor of one thousandth (10 −3).