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Units and Powers of 10
1.1 UNITS
How tall are you? You could answer 5 feet 8 inches, or 68 inches, or 1.73 meters.
These are, of course, all the same heights, but the numbers are different because they
are given in different units of length. Since science, in general, and physics, in par-
ticular, deal with measurement, in either an experiment or a prediction of an experi-
mental outcome, we want to clearly de ne the units we will be using. Not only will
this be important for clarity, but it can have very important practical consequences.
Some of you may have heard that a scienti c experiment failed several years ago
because manufacturers of ...