"Hella" May Become a Scientific Term?

Bay Area residents claim, “That’s hella nerdy.”

I was playing (and sucking) at my daily game of QRank yesterday, when one of the questions said something about “No Doubt would be happy that this word may become an SI prefix.”

My first thought was Sports Illustrated and something to do with swimsuits.  I don’t remember what the other choices were, but I said to myself, “Fuck it!” and I chose “hella.”

AND I WAS RIGHT!

Apparently, a University of California-Davis physics student (Austin Sendek)  is petitioning the International System of Units (SI) to add “hella” as a scientific measurement (like “giga” and “tera” and “mega.”)  “Hella” would be the prefix for 10²⁷, or 1,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000.¹

Check it out:

[video after the jump]

A campaign for “hella” to join the likes of “kilo”, “mega” and “giga” as an internationally accepted prefix is attracting growing support.

More than 20,000 scientists, students and members of the public have signed an online petition backing the new quantity, which would be used for figures with 27 zeros after the first digit.

Currently the highest prefix allowed by the International System of Units (SI) is the “yotta”, for 24 zeroes.

Austin Sendek, the physics student at the University of California who started the campaign, said that recent scientific developments required that the scales of measurement be extended.

“The analysis of many physical phenomena reveals natural quantities in excess of 27 orders of magnitude, a number which is currently ignored by the SI system,” he wrote on the Facebook petition outlining the case for the hella.

“Designating a prefix for 10^27 is of critical importance for scientists in all fields. This number is significant in many crucial calculations, including the wattage of the sun, distances between galaxies, or the number of atoms in a large sample.”

“The amount of energy released by the Sun would be more elegantly expressed as 0.3 hellawatts than as 300 yottawatts,” he added.

Hella is North Californian slang for “very” or “a lot of”. Mr Sendek and his supporters argue that its adoption would be a fitting honour for the state’s impressive record of scientific research.

If the change is approved, the hella would be the first new SI prefix introduced since 1991, when the International Committee for Weights and Measures approved yotta and zetta (21 zeroes).

You can join the hella Facebook petition here.

Meanwhile, I’m going to go eat hella bacon.

¹ This number is hella long, dude.  If I had that much money, I’d have hella money, bro.