Why would you use scientific notation?

Answer 1

Scientific notation is a way of writing really huge, or really tiny, numbers that saves time and space and ink, etc. For example, the World Book Encyclopedia lists the Earth's mass as

6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms.

Why write such an unwieldy number when you can, instead, write

6.0 x 1024 kg.

The classical radius of an electron is

0.0000000000000028179 meters.

Again, why write such a space wasting number when you can write it like so:

2.8179 x 10-15m