BF2S Forums Googol

Thought this may interest some people, pretty hard to comprehend, the original google:

A googolplex is the number 10^{\,\!10^{100}}.

A googol is greater than the number of elementary particles in the known universe.  Since a googolplex is one followed by a googol zeroes, it would not be possible to write down or store a googolplex in decimal notation, even if all the matter in the known universe were converted into paper and ink or disk drives.

Thinking of this another way, consider printing the digits of a googolplex in unreadable, 1-point font. TeX 1pt font is .3514598mm per digit, which means it would take about 3.5\times10^{96} meters to write in one point font. The known universe is estimated at 7.4\times10^{26} meters in diameter, which means the distance to write the digits would be about 4.7\times10^{69} times the diameter of the known universe. The time it would take to write such a number also renders the task implausible: if a person can write two digits per second, it would take around 1.1\times10^{82} times the age of the universe to write down a googolplex.

Edit - Scientific numbers dont work - see here for the original

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googolplex

Last edited by Mong0ose (2006-10-15 08:43:39)