Abstract
THERE is a general agreement among the different languages in naming large numbers up to and including one million, that is, 1,000,000 or 106. But one enters the tower of Babel looking for the name of 1,000,000,000 or 109. In the United States it is known as one billion, in France as un trillion, in Germany as eine Milliarde, and in Russia as odin milliard. Great Britain, Italy and Spain have no special name for that number since the British billion, the Italian bilione, and the Spanish bicuento mean 1,000,000,000,000 or 1012. This fact causes great inconvenience, because in modern science a great many things are measured in the 109 unit. This includes the age of the universe (expressed in years), the cosmic distances (expressed in light years), the temperatures during the early stages of the universal evolution and inside of the exploding stars (expressed in degrees Kelvin), and the energies of modern particle accelerators (expressed in electron volts).
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GAMOW, G. Naming the Units. Nature 219, 765 (1968). https://doi.org/10.1038/219765a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/219765a0
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