Orders of magnitude (momentum)

Okay, sweetie. Do you know how some things are really big and some things are really small? Like an elephant is really big and an ant is really small? When we talk about orders of magnitude, we are talking about how many times bigger or smaller one thing is compared to another.

Momentum is a big word that means how much something is moving and how hard it will be to stop it. When we talk about orders of magnitude with momentum, we are talking about how much more or less momentum something has compared to something else.

For example, a car moving at 10 mph has more momentum than a bicycle moving at 10 mph because the car is so much bigger and heavier. This means that it would be harder to stop the car than the bike.

Sometimes we use scientific notation to talk about orders of magnitude. This just means writing really big or really small numbers in a short and easy way. For example, we might say that the momentum of a car moving at 100 mph is 1,000 times bigger than the momentum of a person walking at 3 mph.

I hope that helps you understand a little bit about orders of magnitude and momentum!