A guy in California is campaigning for hella* for the 10^27 prefix. He says the analysis of many physical phenomena reveals natural quantities in excess of 27 orders of magnitude., e.g the amount of energy released by the Sun would be more elegantly expressed as 0.3 hellawatts than as 300 yottawatts. The guy who heads the Consultative Committee for Units (CCU), the body which advises the international committee, says "The prefixes [zetta & yotta) we introduced 20 years ago are still not widely used. There is no point making changes that nobody pays any attention to and would only make things more complicated." He suggests relaxing the rule forbidding compound prefixes thus allowing kiloyotta etc.
Even if the need for a new prefix was accepted, there is little chance it would take the name hella, he added. Most existing SI prefixes are derived from Latin or Greek words for numbers, a trend that the committee is keen to continue.
