the.com/magnitude
the difference between a tremor you sleep through and a city you bury.
means the size, extent, or importance of something — how big, how strong, or how significant it is.
from From Latin magnitudo, "greatness," built on magnus, "great" or "large" — the same root that swells through magnify, magnificent, and magnate. Magnus traces back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "great" (likely *meg-), a deep ancestor possibly related to Greek megas, as in megaphone. The word entered English in the late Middle Ages purely as a measure of greatness; only much later did science borrow it to grade earthquakes and the brightness of stars, where small numerical steps hide enormous leaps in scale.
- each step
- One number up means roughly 32 times more energy.
- backwards stars
- Brighter stars have smaller magnitude numbers.
- open ended
- No upper limit exists, only what rock can survive.
- log scale
- Magnitude 9 dwarfs magnitude 7 by nearly thousandfold energy.
richter scale — logarithmic scale measuring earthquake magnitude, developed in 1935 by charles richter