…physicists all over the world of scientists (so-called) have been measuring things in different units and cause an enormous amount of complexity. So as a matter of fact nearly a third of what you have to learn consists of different ways of measuring the same thing and I apologize for it.
When talking about energy, do you use electron-volts, ergs, joules, therms, calories, megawatt-hours, barrels of oil, kilotons of TNT, or million tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe)?
After centuries of evolution, in the mid-1900s the scientific community adopted the International System of Units, which is gradually displacing other unit systems worldwide.
But even SI has nanojoules, kilojoules, and terajoules; these different units exist because each one is a linear context, only reasonable to apply to a small range of magnitudes. In essence, an exponent offset is encoded into the unit.
Mag numbers always apply to the base units. In Mag World, you’re not allowed to use metric prefixes (except for kilogram, which is actually a base unit in the standard system). Nanojoules, kilojoules, and terajoules are just verbal encodings of ↑-9, ↑3, and ↑12 energy, respectively.
In Mag World, the technical units are implied when we provide any quantity:
| Quantity | Implied Unit |
|---|---|
| length , size , distance | metre |
| mass | kilogram |
| time , duration , age , latency | second |
| frequency | hertz |
| energy , work , heat | joule |
| power , radiant flux | watt |
| resistance , impedance , reactance | ohm |
| force , weight | newton |
| pressure , stress | pascal |
| temperature | °Celsius |
| data , memory , storage | byte |
SI units are used because they are a) common, b) standardized, c) stable, and d) human-centric.
“… the metre and kilogram occupy a reasonably central position as far as symmetry in positive and negative powers of ten is concerned, emphasising that the SI units are natural anthropic units”. — Brian William Petley (1985)
Humans only generally interact with about 20 levels (the entire universe has far fewer than 100 levels on every dimension we know of). We’ve already standardized on human-sized units (SI units), and the center of those scales are already conveniently ↑0.
On a mag scale, for every type of quantity, only a single unit is available (listed above), so it is implied. Usually “terawatt-hours” is used to imply “electrical energy”, but in Mag World this is reversed: “3 TWh” is “↑16 [electrical] energy” and “10 TWh/year” is “↑9 [electrical] power”. This keeps the focus on the scale and quality instead of getting into unit jargon.
Thus “↑9 energy” always refers to some number of gigajoules.