Trouble With My Space

Over on Nature Networks, Henry Gee a brilliant writer there, alerted me to a debate with cosmic and geological implications. Apparently, there’s a problem with My Gy and the proverbial “they” would like to switch to Ma Ga. So, what’s Henry talking about? You may well ask.

It is a question of scale, something dear to the heart of Significant Figures. Apparently, two august bodies, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), want to change the way we write about years. They are not worried about a decade or two, or even centuries and millennia, they are talking truly cosmo and geo timescales where years are numbered in the millions and billions, mega years and giga years.

Until now, most scientists have assumed that a million years is best abbreviated as Mega year (My) and a billion (1000 million) as a Giga year (Gy) (strictly speaking it is more common to see Myr and Gyr). But, in their wisdom the IUPACS (I-yoo-pax) and IUGS (I-uggs), want us to use annum instead of year, so that we will then talk geologically of the pliocene, for instance, having occurred at 5.3 to 1.8 Ma and the age of the Universe as 13.7 Ga.

Henry suggests that it smacks of a throwback to the Battle of Hastings and “gratuitous Norman French Imperialism”, but I suspect it’s a more recent euphemistic culture of the kind that turns water into aqua on shampoo bottles and renames nuclear processing sites from Windscale to Sellafield as if somehow we would think “they” were talking about a wonderful new seaside resort on the Irish Sea.

All that aside, it does put an odd slant on MySpace.com, will Murdoch have to rebrand and change his accent to comply with the IUPACS and the IUGS, thus bringing us MaSpace instead?