How many pairs of shoes do you have? Maybe you have "lots" or "a bunch" or "a heap." What about coats? Cans of coffee? Books, pictures or socks? There's a good chance in each case that you don't know the exact number of items, and so resort to generalizations. But if push comes to shove, you could line them up, and use your fingers and toes to get a total. You might be embarrassed, but could definitively (and sheepishly) say, "Yes, you got me: I have 10 pairs of running shoes."
However, regardless of the total, you could at least get one. As you look to other areas, the numbers get much larger and the labels change. Collective nouns like crowd, troupe or pile don't offer the precision needed. If you count the storage space on your phone, you have to quantify it way beyond ones and twos, indeed beyond tens and hundreds. In the early days of computers they talked in terms of thousands using the shorthand prefix kilo. As technology improved and capacity went up, those thousands became millions, and the prefix mega became table stakes. Then millions became billions, and now you measure your phone's filing cabinet using the prefix giga.
For most of us, those numbers may be the largest we ever have to deal with. That said, it doesn't take much to take the next step. To put a more modern sheen on the famous observation by the late Senator Everett Dirksen, a giga here, a giga there, and pretty soon you're talking about a lot of data. As we add up pictures and videos and countless downloads of movies, TV shows and TikToks, Dirksen's real money becomes real terabytes, then real petabytes of information.
All of these prefixes and words are shorthand for the exponentially large numbers which underlie whatever you are talking about. Expressed as "ten to the X," they denote a one with a number of zeros after it. So kilo is ten to the third or 3 zeros, while mega is ten to the sixth or 6 zeros. Giga has nine, tera has 12, peta has 15, and on and on up the scale. And while it might be more than you need to total the boxes of pasta in your pantry, it's the stuff needed to track an accounting of stars or molecules without resorting to writing out one and 21 aughts.
Until recently, the top of that scale was yotta, which was ten to the power of 24, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. While the numbers could certainly get bigger, there was no convenient way to talk about them. But now the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory has suggested an extension to the International System of Units. They suggest that if you have more than 1000 yottas of something, you refer to it as a ronna (ten to the 27th), and if more than 1000 ronnas you call it a quecca (10 to the 30th). Either way, that's a hella of a lot of stuff (that's an unofficial name, by the way).
As they say with any new word or phrase, the challenge is how to use it in a sentence. Here's a use case: rather than saying the earth weighs 6000 yottagrams, you will now be able to say it weighs just 6 ronnagrams. The bottom line doesn't change, and yes, it's the most inside-baseball discussion possible, but it makes somebody happy.
Of course, you could just keep going higher and not have a name for it. Or maybe not. Several years ago I was tracking an important delivery sent via FedEx and was surprised to get a notice that it got there on the same day I sent it. I called in to make sure there was no problem, and that my package hadn't been lost. When the agent punched it up, she said it was still in transit, that the notice related to another delivery sent by someone else. When I queried her about the alert, she said that it happens sometimes, as they had to reuse some numbers as they were running out. I paused before responding: "I'm pretty sure that's impossible. You can't run out of numbers. Just add one more." I don't have quecca years of experience, but I'm pretty sure I was standing on firm ground.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford thinks he's pretty good at math. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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