The Format
Scientific notation writes a number as a value between 1 and 10 multiplied by a power of 10. So 6,000,000 becomes 6 × 10⁶ and 0.0000045 becomes 4.5 × 10⁻⁶. The exponent counts how many places the decimal point moved.
Why It's Useful in Conversions
Some conversions involve huge or tiny factors — the speed of light, electronvolts, nanometers. Scientific notation keeps these readable and makes the order of magnitude obvious at a glance, which is harder with long strings of zeros.
Powers of Ten and Prefixes
Each metric prefix corresponds to a power of ten: kilo is 10³, mega is 10⁶, giga is 10⁹, milli is 10⁻³, micro is 10⁻⁶. Knowing this makes it easy to move between scientific notation and unit prefixes.