Thread: Question about E

I am working on a data analysis project using SPSS. I've ran my data, and one of my constants came out as:

4.205E-11

Now I can remember enough to know that this is a small number, but I cannot remember enough to figure out exactly how small.

Since it is E-11, does that mean that it is negative?

I've tried Googling this and everything, but I haven't been able to come up with much. Any help you could provide me with would be greatly appreciated.

Originally Posted by Cloggerdude

I am working on a data analysis project using SPSS. I've ran my data, and one of my constants came out as:

4.205E-11

Now I can remember enough to know that this is a small number, but I cannot remember enough to figure out exactly how small.

Since it is E-11, does that mean that it is negative?

I've tried Googling this and everything, but I haven't been able to come up with much. Any help you could provide me with would be greatly appreciated.

E-11 usually means 10^-11 which in turn means to move the decimal point 11 places to the left

As pointed above, it means moving 11 times to the left. So your number 4.205 will be 0.00000000004205 and as you can see the number remains positive. It is the same as diving the number by 100 billion.