4/13/07

Googol and comparable large numbers

A googol is greater than the number of particles in the observable universe, which has been variously estimated from 1079 up to 1081.[3][4]
A little googol is 2100, or about 1.267x1030, while a little googolplex is or about .
Avogadro's number, 6.0221415x1023, can loosely be thought of as the number of carbon atoms in twelve grams of elemental carbon, and is perhaps the most widely known large number from chemistry and physics. Avogadro's number is much less than a googol.
Black holes are presumed to evaporate because they faintly give off Hawking radiation; if so, a supermassive black hole would take about a googol years to evaporate.[5]
Seventy factorial, or 70!, is just over a googol, 1.19785717 × 10100. This means that there are over a googol ways to arrange seventy items (or people) in a sequence (such as a line to a concert).
The Shannon number, a rough estimate of the number of possible chess games, is very much more than a googol, around the order of 10120.
A googol is considerably less than the number described in the ancient Greek story of The Sand Reckoner, namely

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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