Scientific notation just takes that a step further. In normal language, we like round multiples of millions and billions, but in science, the decimal point is moved all the way to the front, and then the number of digits is specified. So the age of the universe is 1.38E+10. That E is actually a lazy way of writing an exponential: the universe is 1.38 × 1010 years old. For a very small measurement, a negative number is used for the size. A proton has a mass of 1.67E−27 kg. That’s much neater than writing 0.00000000000000000000000000167 kg.
