The Biggest Numbers in the World Size Comparison

What's the largest number you can imagine? Trillions of trillions. If you're not a professional mathematician and not some cool physicist, the answer is probably approximate. And could we visualize this number? Nope, we're not going to write out all those zeros on paper. I suggest having a look at a device that shows the total number of atoms in the universe, and even surpasses it. I agree this doesn't sound very realistic, but such a mechanism does exist, and I managed to find it. Just imagine a device that counts a number with an unrealistically large amount of zeros, so big that neither you nor me nor even our descendants would have enough time to wait for the count to finish. What's this mechanism? In fact, it's all quite simple. But to create such a device, first you need to grasp other really large numbers. I'll start with some simpler ones, just to help you understand the scale. Take, for example, a million. That's 10 to the 6th power. We come across millions of things quite often. Modern blockbusters like The Avengers worth hundreds of millions of dollars. With enough patience, you could even count up to a million. A million seconds is only 11 and a half days. A stack of a million standard books placed on top of each other wouldn't even reach beyond the Earth's atmosphere. In turn, one thick book can be made from one million letters. And if we constructed a building with a million floors, it wouldn't be able to stand, it would collapse. But using your imagination, such a building would rise to a height of 3,000 kilometers or 1,864 miles. What about a billion? This is a bit more serious. That's 10 to the 9th power. 7 and a half billion people live on Earth today. On average, the human brain contains about 100 billion neurons. For a billion dollars, you can buy a luxury cruise ship. But it's unlikely anyone could count to a billion. That's almost 32 years. Now, 10 to the 12th power is a trillion. 3 and a half trillion fish inhabit our oceans. A trillion bacteria take up no more space than one cube of sugar. A trillion seconds is approximately 32,000 years. That is, a trillion seconds ago, in some places on our planet, the last Neanderthals still walked the Earth. In total, every printed book in history together contain about 100 trillion letters. A quadrillion is 10 to the 15th power. A 1 with 15 zeros. This is so large that I had to search a bit to find an example. It's believed that about one quadrillion ants live on our planet. Although I doubt that anyone's conducted a census. Once, American Chris Reynolds was mistakenly credited $92 quadrillion to his account. This made him the richest man in the world. Though not for long. And in another 200 quadrillion seconds, our sun will have become a red giant. 10 to the 18th power is a quintillion. This is 1,000 times larger than a quadrillion. It's believed that the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is about 1 quintillion kilometers, a little more than half a quintillion miles. Five or six quintillion glasses would be enough to scoop all of the water out of the world ocean. And lastly, the number of possible combinations of a Rubik's cube is 43 quintillion or more. Now, let's take a really big number. For example, a septillion. 10 to the 24th power. About 10 septillion water molecules fit in one glass. And lastly, the number that we came here for. A 1 with 100 zeros. 10 to the 100th power. This number is called Google. Don't confuse it with the Google search engine, even if that's what your grandmother calls it. The term Google was coined by nine-year-old Milton Sirota, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. This happened back in 1920. 20 years later, Kasner popularized the number Google with the help of his book Mathematics and the Imagination. Later, the consonant word Google became known around the world. And all because of a mistake made by the founders of the company. They wanted to call the search engine Google, hinting at the large amount of information that could be obtained. But they messed up the letters. But it's too late to change anything now, don't you think? Despite this, there's probably hardly anything in the world that could be described with a figure containing 100 zeros. Yes, I used to think so too. But it turns out that with the help of the number Google, it's possible to portray the number of hypothetical possibilities in a chess game. But a Google is larger than the number of atoms in the known part of the universe. According to various estimates, this number ranges from 10 to the 78th power to 10 to the 82nd power. So, can you imagine just how big the number Google is? It's also useful for discussing black holes. The time it takes for a supermassive black hole to decay, whose mass is equal to that of one galaxy, is 10 to the 100th years. See? So convenient. But what about the visualization that I spoke about at the beginning of the video? For this, it's worth thanking the artist named Daniel De Bruyn. This guy just loves all kinds of mechanisms and seems to have quite an affinity for math. On March 1st, 2020, at 2.52 pm, Daniel celebrated his anniversary. He turned one billion seconds old. If you feel like there aren't enough holidays in your life, you can also celebrate such dates. To celebrate, the artist created a machine that produces a representation of the number Google. The result is a transmission system that needs to be activated more times than there are atoms in the universe. And all of this for the sake of obtaining one single output. The machine is quite simple. It consists of 100 gears, all of which are connected to one another in a special way. If you turn the first wheel 10 times, the second wheel attached to it makes exactly one revolution. If you turn the wheel 100 times, the second one revolves 10 times, allowing the third wheel to revolve once. And so on. As a result, in order for the last gear wheel to make one revolution, the first one must be rotated a Google times. Cool. However, the mechanism has a serious drawback. We won't be able to see the results. Even if De Bruijn himself rotated the mechanism all his life, at one revolution per second, he would only reach the ninth level of wheels. And this is without interruption or breaks for sleep, food and other things. It's completely unrealistic. But what if you used a motor instead? It could spin the wheels at a tremendous speed. Surely this would help it reach the number Google. Alas, most likely, the wheels would simply wear out or break. And this would happen long before the mechanism reached the 100 zeros it aimed for. But don't think that a Google is the largest number imaginable. A Googleplex is 10 to the power of a Google or a one followed by Google zeros. This term was also proposed by Edward Kastner's nephew. If you printed Googleplex in a series of books, each one containing a million characters, then you would need 10 to the 94th power of these books. And together they would more than the entire Milky Way galaxy. So with the simplest visual representation of a Googleplex, serious problems still arise. But okay, then is Googleplex the biggest number in the world? Nope. There is, for example, Graham's number. Graham's number is an unimaginable number of times greater than a Googleplex. The entire observable universe is too small to contain an ordinary decimal notation of this number. And degrees don't help here either. So pass this information on to Daniel De Bruyne. Perhaps he's looking for a way to celebrate his next birthday. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven't already done so. And click on the bell to receive timely notifications of new interesting videos in store for you ahead. Transcribed by https://otter.ai