I find the "billionth of a metre thick" phrasing painful, but I guess it's better than if they'd written that it was "a trillionth of a kilometre thick"
BTW, it's not even 1 billionth of a metre thick. It's 200 nm. That's 0.2 microns. That's 2 * 10^-7. It's 0.2 of a millionth.
They should have just said 0.2 microns instead. It carries just as much actual meaning for the layperson, and it's a lot easier to parse if you are scientifically literate.
Um, 1 billionth of a meter is 1 nm. Saying it's 200 nm (like the paper says) is very different from saying it's 1 billionth of a meter (like the linked article incorrectly says).
A pretty common approach (at least in Canada) is to use prefixes at intervals of 1000 - mm, m, km and then larger unit to one decimal for large values - 700m as 0.7km, 0.9l instead on 900ml, and so-on.
Though it's almost unheard of now, a british billion = 1000 * a british million. In that context it does hold, being 2 british billionths of a metre thick.
That said, here we all bascially use the American 'billion' because it makes a more logical approach and allows for dealing with larger numbers more easily.
Wow I screwed up big time. I meant to say it was a million million and I have no idea why I said otehrwise. I'm going to blame tiredness. Thanks for the correction.
Decent point, but most people familiar with metric would work with smaller units than metres and for those unfamiliar with metric, describing it as a billionth of a yard would still sound like a pretty peculiar.
I think describing it as a minute fraction of an inch or centimetre would still be pretty accessible without having to get people to visualize a nanometre.
