I was reading an article (The (Other) Secret: Scientific American (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=72C0E84D-E7F2-99DF-3D281803B61E675C&chanID=sa006&colID=13)) and they used some strange notation when they gave magnetic field strengths for the human brain and the earth.

For example, the article says that the earth's magnetic field is {10}^{!!5} tesla but I've never seen the {10}^{!!x} notation before.

From (Earth's magnetic field - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_magnetic_field)): the earth's magnetic field is somewhere between "less than 30 microteslas ... to over 60 microteslas".
I'm not sure how one would get such a value from that notation.
How does {10}^{!!5} equal somewhere between 0.00003 and 0.00006?

Is anyone familiar with this notation? Or does anyone have any plausible explanations for how it works?

Looks like it's meant to be 10^-5, but they've used some weird way of rendering it, i get a square (missing character) instead of the! You describe.

10^{\mu 5} gal? :/ that's not any notation I've seen before either...

Ok. I think I tend to agree with Capuchin after reading it again. Even though 10^-5 is outside the range given by wikipedia I do think that's what they were going for. The key is that they say 10^{!!-5} is 10 orders of magnitude larger than 10^{!!-15}. It's strange that I got! But Capuchin got a box because the html is actually

10^5

at least for me.

10^-5 is the same order of magnitude as the wikipedia numbers. They weren't being accurate.