Big Numbers

On 30 November the Guardian newspaper reported that an International team have measured the total amount of light emitted by all the stars in the universe in the 13.7 billion year history of the universe. Apparently the stars in the universe are so far apart that over 90% of the light emitted never hits any other body and forms a fog of background light that can be measured, enabling the total number of photons to be estimated. The estimate is 4 X 10 to the 84th power!

This is a really big number, in fact it is literally millions and millions and millions times bigger than any number I have ever heard of before. Do any readers have any other examples of big numbers?

Rod

Mmmm, that is big - Pi is currently 'only' up to 22 trillion digits...

US national debt ?

A conservative estimate for the number of possible ways in which a chess game could play out was calculated by the mathematician Claude Shannon - 10 to the power 120.....

Hmm... as photons are probably the most abundant particle in the universe, that's probably the biggest number with a practical meaning (as against probabilities, wacky primes etc.)

If dark matter or dark energy could lead to something more abundant.

Neil

I once heard that there are 10 to the 80 electrons in the universe. For anyone interested in quantum mechanics and general relativity, there is a series of YouTube videos called PBS Space Time and also lectures at the Royal Institution. Absolutely fascinating.

Most abundant particles ? Dark matter, which makes up 27% of the mass of the universe is a contender but mysterious and not well understood. Neutrinos are up there - they are very numerous albeit small !

Coincidentally, I got curious about my e-mail account this morning as my host permits "unlimited" forwarders within a domain. With 26 letters and 0-10 there are 36 possible characters, and you are allowed 64 characters before the @. This suggests (if my vague memories of 1970s stats classes are correct) that there could be 36^64 + 36^63 + 36^62+.....+36 permissible e-mail addresses on a single domain!

Whilst I suspect the sun would be long dead before I could set them all up, effectively it means my "catch all" forwarder can pass on e-mails sent to more addresses than there are atoms in the universe... I don't think I have ever typed the word "freaky" before, but I think this might deserve it.

Brian

It's called Quantitative Easing.

I love blowlamp's link to the US Treasury figures.

Does anyone know if there is an equivalent UK Treasury webpage?

It would make interesting! reading as the Brexit debacle unfolds.

Rod

One of the major philosophical questions right there. If the universe is truly infinite, nothing in it can be finite except in relation to something else.

The problem with numbers beyond a certain size is the human brain is unable to comprehend them. The brain can see relative graphs or other comparative formulae but is quite incapable of comprehending the actual quantity except in the very loosest term. We might comprehend ten thousand millimetres in terms of a ten metre tape but we simply don't operate as a living creature on the same scales. Such vast numbers do not play a part in our day to day business of being a living creature and our brains lack the wiring for the comprehension of such large numbers. Even the old chess board example is hard for people to get there head around hence its existence. The idea is that you will be rewarded for something if you can add a grain of rice to the first square of the board, two grains on the second, four on the third etc until the board is completely covered. Most people's gut feeling is no problem but the fact is not enough grains of rice exist to get to the 64th square. You would need 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. This is one less than 2 raised to the power of 64.

Dunno how accurate it is but have a look at this website!

Dave

Could you express it in the terms of a 'set meal for four'? I'd comprehend that.

My Dentists recent estimate!

The number quoted applies only to the observable universe. www.astronomy.com/news/2018/11/scientists-calculate-how-much-starlight

If the universe is infinite, than there are more than 4 X 10 to the 84th power toenails in it...

Neil

I thought current theory was that the universe is finite albeit expanding but also containing bubble universes within itself and may also be a bubble within another universe. I feel boggled.

pgk

I was prompted to reopen this old thread by a recent report in the Guardian newspaper of a meeting of the General Conference of weights and Measures in Versailles recently which agreed to adopt some new prefixes to SI units to cope with the very (very) large, and also the very (very) small.

"Ronna", will be used for a billion, billion, billon , 10* 27, and "Quetta" will be used for a billion, billion, billion, billion, 10* 36.

And, for small things, "Ronto" will be 10* - 27 and "Quecto" will be 10* - 36. ( I hope my improvised notation is understandable.)

So the the Earth now weighs 6 ronnagrams, and Jupiter about 2 quettagrams. An electron weighs about a rontogram and a single bit of data on a mobile phone adds about 10 quectograms to its mass.

Something to think about when trying to make something to the nearest thou.

Thanks to the Guardian for the update.

Rod

If there's a prize for the largest number actually meaningful in a forum project, my claim is numbers bigger than 1669308703349198682.

On my clock project, the log program timestamps each tick with UNIX time, which is the number of nanoseconds since 00:00:00 UTC on the 1st January 1970. Since I started typing this post the number has increased by 541,263,407,972 to 1,669,309,244,612,606,654

The US national debt is a mere $31,000,000,000,000, which means each american citizen owes about $92260 ...

Each UK citizen owes about £30,000 (roughly $36,000). Is it because Britain has better managed government finances than our spendthrift cousins, or is it because the UK economy being smaller caps our ability to borrow?

Dave

I think my energy bill is going to be a very large number this year........