I have no trouble with thousands and can just about get my head around a million. After all, there are about 32 million seconds in a year and my heart beats an average of 39 million times in that time. Being trained as an engineer gave me a comfort zone with really large numbers, like the number of atoms in a "gram mole" of an element: 6.022 times ten raised to the 23rd power. A "gram mole" or mole is the atomic weight of an element in grams. That is more of a convenience when it comes to figuring out chemistry problems than a reality. Atoms are very small, too small to be seen through even the most powerful optical microscope. Scientists have to use an electron microscope to image atoms. Light is easy too. It travels about 186,000 miles per second. So in one tick of a stop watch, a ray of light will go (assuming you can get it to go around in a circle... it tends to go in a straight line) about seven times around the equator. By the way, light can travel a little less than 6 times ten to the twelfth power (trillion in the US; in Europe, a trillion is ten to the 18th).
Another by the way, there is more than one kind of second. There is the solar second, the one we use in our clocks. But some people in Europe decided that they needed a standard second based on the metric system, the System International (SI) second which is a little more than 99% of a solar second. Astronomers got into the act with the sidereal second. A sidereal second is more than 20 solar seconds. Go figure. I had to. But then I figured that we can't even use the same voltage as they do and there are three or four different kinds of plugs and outlets for electricity. Which one depends on which country you visit.
Very small things seem to make sense... to a point. A centimeter is about four tenths (0.4) of an inch. A millimeter is about four hundredths (0.04) of an inch. A mil is one thousandth of an inch when you're talking paint (my former specialty). When you get down to micrometers (0.001) meters, it gets a little harder. The nanometer is something I can't visualize. Wavelengths of light are measured in nanometers. A nanometer is smaller than an atom. I just can't get my head around that.
So when the media talk about 300 billion dollars a day for the war in Iraq or 400 billion dollars for this and that, my little brain seizes up and refuses to comprehend. When we're talking about something too small to see, there is no problem. But dollars? Not only can I see them and spend them, but when I'm lucky, I have a couple in my wallet. I guess someone like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet can understand a billion. They have several in their bank accounts. But to me, it doesn't make as much sense as the number of atoms in a mole.
Any good physics book will tell you all the prefixes (centi milli, kilo etcetera) in the metric system. You'll probably be able to find things like the mass of the Earth in kilograms or the average distance from the Earth to the moon. But for me, there is a vast difference between being able to spout those huge numbers and actually wrapping my mind around them.
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