Getting your head around big numbers

[kiloran]

Like most people, I have problems truly comprehending the scale of big numbers, like:

• UK government debt is £1.8 trillion (or whatever)
• There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy (+/- one or two)
• There are 200 billion galaxies in the universe
• There are 40 quintillion atoms in a grain of sand

Well, today I found a way of demonstrating the immense magnitude of such numbers.

I was pottering about in the greenhouse and thought I'd tidy up a piece of garden fleece piled in a corner at the end of the staging. Grabbed a handful and it instantly shattered into a zillion pieces. Picked up one of those pieces and it shattered into a quadrillion pieces, each less than the size of an atom. Maybe the size of a couple of quarks.
Put a bucket next to the large remnant, tried to gently coax it into the bucket and and suddenly had more bits of fleece than there are atoms in the universe.

I now understand what large numbers really look like.

And I'll also learn what really long timescales are like...... it'll take me 400 octillion years to clean up the mess.

--kiloran

[Rhyd6]

I understand your pain, huge numbers just pass me by, I have to have something to relate to, my brain just won't comprehend some of the figures that are being bandied about at the moment. Mind you, I don't think we'll have any problem understanding the increase in tax needed to pay for this, as my dad used to say "you don't get 'owt for nowt".

R6

[bungeejumper]

I was mildly amused the other day, while listening to the BBC going on about panic buying, when they came out with the shock assertion that British households now had a billion pounds-worth more food in their larders than they'd had a week previously. And what a terrible, awful, irresponsible thing that was.

I've never had a very instinctive head for maths, but even I could see that this billion pounds represented about fifteen quid per person - about two days' worth of food shopping, and slightly more than 1% of the nation's annual grocery spend (which is approx £97 billion). Given that this was the week in which we were all told we'd have to hunker down at home for three months (or was it four?), it didn't seem so very unreasonable.

But there have always been idiots trying to bamboozle us with big numbers. For me, the antidote to all this has always been https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpu ... adio=1&t=0 .

BJ

[Itsallaguess]

Speaking of big numbers....

Did you know that if you multiply 111,111,111 with 111,111,111, you get 12,345,678,987,654,321


If you want to know about really big numbers though, you're going to have to be aware of Graham's Number....

Graham's number is much larger than many other large numbers such as Skewes' number and Moser's number, both of which are in turn much larger than a googolplex.

As with these, it is so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space.

But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe.

Nor even can the number of digits of that number—and so forth, for a number of times far exceeding the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe. Thus Graham's number cannot be expressed even by power towers of the form

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number

That was in 1977 though, and so the recent 'micro-fragmenting garden-fleece experiment' might have just broken new ground in this field....

Cheers,

Itsallaguess