Scientists introduce new measuring units

PARIS: What is bigger: A ronna or a quetta?

Scientists meeting outside of Paris – who have expanded the world’s measuring unit systems for the first time this century as the global population surges past eight billion – have the answer.

Rapid scientific advances and vast worldwide data storage on the web, in smartphones and in the cloud mean that the very terms used to measure things in weight and size need extending too. And one British scientist led the push on Friday to incorporate bold new, tongue-twisting prefixes on the gigantic and even the minuscule scale.

“Most people are familiar with prefixes like milli- as in milligram. But these are prefixes for the biggest and smallest levels ever measured,” said Dr Richard Brown, head of Metrology at the UK’S National Physical Laboratory who proposed the four new prefixes.

“In the last 30 years, the datasphere has increased exponentially, and data scientists have realised they will no longer have words to describe the levels of storage. These terms are upcoming, the future,” he said.

There’s the gargantuan “ronna” (that’s 27 zeros after the one) and its big brother the “quetta” – (that’s 30 zeros).

Their ant-sized counterparts are the “ronto” (27 zeros after the decimal point), and the “quecto” (with 30 zeros after the decimal point) – representing the smaller numbers needed for quantum science and particle physics.

Brown presented the new prefixes to officials from 64 nations attending the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles – who approved them on Friday.

The conference, which takes place every four years in France, is the supreme authority of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.

The new terms take effect immediately, marking the first time since 1991 that any new additions have been made.

Brown said the new terms also make it easier to describe things scientists already know about – reeling off a list of the smallest and

biggest things discovered by humankind.

Did you know that the mass of an electron is one rontogram? And that a byte of data increases the phone’s mass by one quectogram?

Further from home, the planet Jupiter is two just quettagrams in mass. While, incredibly, “the diameter of the entire observable universe is just one ronnameter”.