Using lots of zeros in large numbers gets very confusing. It is hard to distinguish between 1000000 and 10000000 in print. It's a bit easier with commas in place, eg: 1,000,000 and 10,000,000 - but when you reach very large numbers, even that's not much help - you have to spend time counting zeros. In Gravitorium, you are typically dealing with very large numbers. The mass of the Earth, for example, is about 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms!
Scientific notation is a way of showing large numbers that "counts the zeros" for you.
As used in Gravitorium, the scientific notation for:
100 is 1E2.
1,000 is 1E3.
10,000 is 1E4.
Do you get it? The number after the E is the number of zeros.
You can express more complicated numbers like this:
250 = 2.5 x 100 = 2.5 x 1E2 = 2.5E2
or
1,343 = 1.343 x 1000 = 1.343 x 1E3 = 1.343E3
...and so on.
Using this scheme, then, the mass of the Earth is about 6E24 kg.
You can also use scientific notation to describe very small numbers:
0.1 = 1E-1
0.01 = 1E-2
The negative number indicates that we are counting the zeros after the decimal point (plus the zero in front of the decimal point).
Using this system you can express any number, no matter how large or small, in a very compact manner.
Purists (and some teachers) may object that this version of scientific notation isn't
very scientific (though it is how it is expressed in most computer languages). In science textbooks and scientific papers, you'll see scientific notation written out
like this:
This is real scientific notation - and after the above explanation you can probably see how it matches up with the notation I've used, which is a bit easier to type into a text box.