Re: Googling

John Cowan wrote:
>
>Henrik Theiling scripsit:
>
> > What strange words you have!  What for?  Not for money, definitely.
> > Not for atoms in the universe, either!
>
>A child, the nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner, was
>asked to name "the largest number he could think of": he gave the name
>"googol", and defined it as "1 followed by writing 0s until you get tired."
>Kasner objected that this varied from person to person, and asked for
>a more definite value: it became definitely "1 with a hundred zeros".
>It is not used seriously.
>
>Later, Kasner or another defined "googolplex" as 10 to the googol'th power:
>a number too large to write down in the Observable Universe, even using
>atoms for digits.
Actually, that's not that impressive. Feynmann estimated the total number of
elementary particles in the Observbale Universe to a mere 10^80, and this
number is probably still up-to-date as it occurs in a publication by the
Swedish Physicist Association from 2000. So, using atom per digit (each atom
on the average containing 3-4 elementary particles), you couldn't write a
googol with all the matter in the Observable Universe by a long shot.

Another largish number is a centilliard, aka 10^603. In a SF novel by the
Swedish author Per Nilson, the main characters spend some time
philosophizing over the number 1000^(1000^(1000^1000))). That's also
somewhat big.

                                           Andreas
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