From: "Andreas Johansson" <and_yo@...>
> 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.
The *googol* is only a 1 with a hundred zeros. You can *write* it
"100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000"
You just couldn't find anything to count with such a number.
The googolplex being 10 to the
1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000th power (or: 1 with a googol zeroes after it) is
the difficult one. (It might fit in something like a 8x10^75 yottabyte
plain text file, without line breaks...)
*Muke!
--
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