Scientific notation is a way to express very large or small numbers in a more concise form by writing them as the product of a number between 1 and 10 and a power of 10. It is commonly used in scientific calculations where precision is important. Numbers are converted to scientific notation by moving the decimal place to have one non-zero digit before it and counting the number of places moved as the exponent. Positive exponents indicate moving the decimal right and negative exponents left.