This One Goes Past A Trillion

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Regardless of which side of the political fence you're on, the numbers are hard to grasp. The country's imbalance between money in and money out for the month of April was over $82 Billion. The Troubled Asset Relief program passed in 2008, better known as TARP, amounted to $700 Billion. And the latest estimate for the total Federal deficit is currently estimated to hit $1.56 Trillion by the end of the year. That's "billion" with a "B" which rhymes with "trillion" with a "T," and to paraphrase the "The Music Man," that means trouble right here in River City

But back to the numbers: I don't know about you, but I hate to carry anything bigger than a twenty dollar bill in my pocket. So dealing with numbers like a trillion is an abstract concept at best. Many have tried to visualize it: a football field of $100 bills 90 feet high, a row of $1 bills circling the globe approximately 2.72 times around the equator, the amount of money Lady Gaga spends on wardrobe in a given week, to name but a few. Regardless, most of us will have to be content with talking even if we don't have the credit line to cover it.

However, that's when it's all about dollars. If you shift the discussion from money to information, the numbers don't seem so huge anymore. Or more to the point, they seem to be growing at a rate that is barely able to keep up with our needs. Think of your music, video and pictures. We used to talk about data in terms of kilobytes, or 1000 bytes. Then megabytes, or 1000 kilobytes became the norm. Now we routinely transfer and walk around with memory sticks than hold gigabytes, or 1000 megabytes. And it's not uncommon to find home computers these days with drives that handle terabytes, or 1000 gigabytes, which, coincidentally, is the same as a trillion. In taxes, huge number: in footage of your vacation, not so much.

So where do we go from here? Believe it of not, there is a governing body that actually deals with this kind of stuff. The International Bureau of Weights and Measures, which is headquartered near Paris and is known by its French initials BIPM, is charged with, among other things, maintaining the International System of Units, also known as SI. Based on the metric system, this scale goes well beyond a trillion to "peta," "exa" and "zeta." It currently ends in "yotta," which is a one with 24 zeros after it. So you can factually say "that's a whole yotta stuff," and then count and see if you've gotten shortchanged.

Recently, a student at the University of California at Davis proposed the next step in the scale. Austin Sendek is a physics student who was working on a project in a lab class. His asked his partner how many volts were in an electric field they were studying, to which he answered "a helluva lot." The voltage in question lit up a bulb on their lab bench and another in Sendek's brain, and the next thing you know he had set up a Facebook group and garnered over 60,000 friends who wanted to make "hella" the next prefix in the chain.

It's no joke. With the existing system stopping at yotta, there is indeed a need for a term for when the zeros climb to the next order of magnitude, or 27. Sendek has spoken with an advisor to the international committee, and has gotten a commitment to introduce the suggestion at their next meeting in September. According to a posting, Sendek said the advisor "...thought the idea was very entertaining and he'd get a few laughs from it, but he wasn't sure the scientists would take it seriously."

That would depend on how tuned in the scientists are to popular sentiment. After all, it was a Facebook movement that brought Betty White to "Saturday Night Live," giving the show its highest rating in 18 months. And that has been followed by a similar movement to have her co-host the Emmys with Jimmy Fallon. So if enough people sign onto the hella movement, it could bring a little populism to science.

It's worth noting as well that the SI naming conventions dictate that as the number get larger the prefix ends in "a," while when it gets smaller it ends in "o." So for the record the equivalent smaller or shorter measure would be not "hella" but "hello," as in hello-seconds. And shorter than that? Well, if you live where we do, you know that interval by another name: a New York Minute.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford hasn't joined any Facebook groups. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review and The Scarsdale Inquirer.