And if you consider that there is an infinite number of whole numbers, between each of those infinite whole numbers, there is an infinite number of fractions...
Challenge accepted: A little while ago, I printed out the largest prime number (because I'm a big nerd) on standard 8.5x11 paper at 3-point font, with half-inch margins. Tiny, but still large enough to read by the naked eye (and large enough for the printer to print legibly). It took about 175 pages, front and back. The largest prime is 22,338,618 digits long, giving 22,338,618 digits / 175 pages. 22,338,618 is 10^7.35, which means I need 10^92.65 times as many pages as before to print a googleplex. 175 pages x 10^92.65 is 10^94.89 pages. A single page is about 30 mm^3 in volume. Thus, this would require a volume of 30 mm^3 / page * 10^94.89 pages is 10^96.37 mm^3 total. One light-year is 9.46 x 10^18 mm, so that equates out to volume of 2.77 x 10^39 ly^3, which is a cube 140 TRILLION light-years on each side. If the stack of paper were the size of a house, the visible universe would be the size of a small marble. Can't be stuffed into the universe, indeed.
@@kishaloyb.7937 Unless, perhaps, that knowledge is incomplete. We only have "known" largest prime numbers. There are msot certainly larger. Our friend here is very outdated already.
Ok, so, mindblown. Thanks. But still been trying to wrap my head around this for about two days now. So I opened an excel sheet and typed the number one. Then below it typed =A1*2 and dragged that formula to repeat itself to see how far it would go. After just the hundred trillions, excel gets lazy and just adds zeros to the back of the numbers and that's just 1*10^15. After 1*10^145 the numbers didn't fit on the screen and after 9*10^307 it just reads error. So I tried Word. typed a page of zeros at 8 pt font then copied and pasted it. Did that for 10 pages then copied and pasted that till 100 pages etc etc. After 20,000 pages I only have 150,000,000 zeros an that's just 1.5*10^8 and the computer takes almost two minutes to load a new paste.I love that I can put in a simple math idea and crash my computer.
Because it sticks in my head the most, I believe that this was the first episode of Cosmos I watched back in '80. It also introduced me to classical music. The Haydn Trumpet Concerto remains my favorite piece. Thanks, Dr. Sagan!
RIP Carl Sagan. As a young person at the time, I found his series, Cosmos,to be thoroughly enthralling. It ignited in me an insatiable desire to learn about Science. He was a superlative teacher and one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century. A true genius.
"What do you do for a living?" "I work with Carl Sagan." "That must be cool." "He gave me a roll of paper and told me to write a googolplex on it." "Seriously?" "Yup. Worst. Boss. Ever."
Genius. I need to buy this series on DVD. I've forgotten how much pure intellectual gold is in it. Thanks asantos for the upload. I was laughing all the way through. Carl = legend x 10 ^ Googplex.
Cosmos, even if it is a few decades old, should be seen by all. What a wonderful series that provokes thought and logic. Carl Sagan was a great person influencing countless people. Much respect to him and those that follow in his footsteps like Neil Tyson Degrasse... wish our media would promote this stuff more instead of ignorance.
I’ve used this example (what is, and how large is a Googolplex) as a “nugget of thought” when teaching engineering courses. It never fails to blow a few minds in the classroom. Inevitably there is a student who smugly doubts the immensity of a Googolplex, and who promises to “come back tomorrow” with a better, more suitable way to write it down. They return for the next class and sheepishly admit they laid awake more than once trying to picture this number in their head only to gradually realize they are dealing with an incredible size that cannot be dealt with outside of the way/method DR Sagan provides.
When I was a kid in the 80’s, my father would sit me down to watch Sagan on PBS. We saw this specific episode on its original broadcast. The next school day I told my friends mom I had learned the word “googol,” and she told me to “Stop using baby talk.” It’s my dad’s favorite story about my youth and education.
The most compelling response to the futility of writing out a googolplex would be to say, "Well why not make the zeros really small or write on incredibly thin paper".....until you do the math. The known Universe is ~ 10^78 m3. If we were to divide it up into a googol boxes, a box for each zero, then each box would be ~ 10^-22m3. That's roughly the size of a hydrogen atom. Put another way you could just about cram a googol H atoms into the known universe with no spaces in between.
FYI that number would be much more than 100,000 zeros following the 1. 100,000 zeros is 10^5^1 which is much less than even 10^10^1, much less 10^10^10.
when your dead, your dead, you are exactly like everything and everyone around you. without the little particles and atoms in your head to know what was going on,you would be like you were before you were born,unable to think, unable to know, unable to do anything. we are equal to this universe, we are nothing special.we are like the plants, the animals, and the planets. we are just parts of this amazing and beautiful universe. and we are able to have the gift to know how it works. -Carl Sagan
Evolutionary Theory fully rejects the concept of irreducible complexity, whereas ID is dependent on it. There's your paradox. How do you reconcile acceptance of both?
What's larger: a Googolplex or Graham's Number? My mind is too small to even consider the notion of thinking of dreaming about coming up with an idea of a method to develop a way of thinking about pondering the conception of a thought to start deciphering a way to even begin considering calculating the first few digits of either of these numbers.
Grahams number is equally as close to infinite as a Googolplex as 1 as well. I think its amazing though that Grahams number ends with a 7, so no matter how much time it would take to write it, you would eventually in a seemingly incredibly long time finish writing it. But in the time it would take you to write that, you could write it again a Grahams number amount of times and still at that point be as close to infinite as Grahams number, Googolplex and indeed.... ONE.
Couuld it be the same thing with lightspeed? As Carl Sagan explained in earlier episodes, you can only approach the speed of light, but you can never get there (as far as we know now). Maybe those are just the boundaries nature has set for us.
What did I learn today? That you can "Stack" exponents. I didn't knw that you could write 10 ^(10^100) like that. It must make for some mind twisting math to keep that straight.
Wait until you get a load of Graham's number en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number it's so big that stacking exponents isn't enough to express it. It needs to use en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation
_A number one followed by one hundred zeroes is known by what name?_ is the question that won Charles Ingram a one followed by six zeroes (in pound sterling), after a great deal of prevaricating. I knew the answer instantly, having watched _Cosmos_ some twenty years previously. Of course it didn't do him much good, as he soon had it taken away from him.
@lzoli18B It was a joke - he said "we STARTED to write it". Remember a googol is MANY times greater than the number of elementary particles in the known universe, and a googolplex is 10 to the POWER of that many. So it's 1 followed by more zeroes than there are particles in the known universe.
@takkie23 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 about 1.51 × 1092 years, which is 1.1 × 1082 times the age of the universe, to write a googolplex.
@kaneda956 A duotrigintillion is the name given to 10^99 - so using the same common system, 10^100 is equal to ten duotrigintillion. A "googol" is just a simpler, more commonly used name for this same number
Exponentiation is notably not associative, 10^10^100 can have two radically different meanings. (10^10)^100=10^1000, which would be 1 followed by a thousand zeros. But a googolplex is 10^(10^100).
How can you say any number larger than one is the exact same distance from infinity? Like he said even though a googol plex is large 1 is exactly the same distance from infinity. It is exactly 1 googol plex -1 closer. But infinity isn't any closer. hey! I just answered my own question but it is still a paradox.
Does MS Word have some kind of internal compression algorithm? It seems to me that to write it in a text file, it'd require a googol bytes, which is a substantially larger amount of storage.
...if we assume that there are another 250b galaxies (so, 500 billion galaxies in total, as some German scientists' supercomputer concluded recently), then that number only changes to 4.374 * 10^84 atoms. Assuming there are 300 particles in an atom, then you have ~1.31 * 10^87 particles in the Universe. Very approximate obviously, as there's no constant number of particles per atom, plus 500b galaxies isn't a confirmed number, and I assumed that all galaxies are the same size as the Milky Way...
I think Google is listening to my conversations through my smart phone. I was just talking about Googol & Googolplex this morning. This is not the first time something like this has happened.
A googolplex light years and a googolplex nanometers will barely make any difference. That is the really cool bit. Check out Graham's number, it makes the googolplex look like 0.
@vskynet This question is difficult to understand. Are you asking if zero equals other numbers? No. Your mistake seems to be that you think you can somehow "divide" a digit of a larger number of existence as if it were a multiplication. You can't. 10 does not equal 1 times 0, it equals ten.
You see 10^4 is 10 times more larger than 10^3. As the higher you go in powers the numbers get mind numbingly large, and every increasing power increases that by a fold of 10. The number they came up with is an average, they take in account the averages of many objects in the universe. Who knows how accurate it is. But it must be within a certain range atleast such that many of them agree on it.
Why would you want to make a number like the googolplex? What is the use of it? If the number of elementary particles in the universe is "only" 10^80, why would you make a number as big as 10^10^100?
@ChocolateEater21 Unfortunately it didn't help me:( You said "A googolplex is the number 1, followed by a googol amount of zeroes after it." But a googol is 1 followed by 100 zeroes, so the way I understand it a googol and googolplex is the same thing, but that's not correct either.
@crazygeo81 Just because all numbers are a bunch of ones added together, doesn't mean 1 is the only number. And just because they are the same distance from infinity doesn't make them the same number.
Let's just say that the volume for said apple pie is 15*10*5cm, then the Earth would be 1.463 * 10^19 times as big as the apple pie, which would give the Earth something like 1.463 * 10^45 atoms. Multiply that by 1.3 million and you have 1.9019 * 10^51 atoms in the Sun. Then, the number of atoms in our galaxy is approximately 8.74874 * 10^72. If we assume there are ~250b galaxies in the universe, there'd be ~2.187 * 10^84 atoms. At this point...
@Flopieto Because infinity goes on forever.....there is even a number called a Flopieto. And even a OOBilly. Both make a googlplex seem like the amount of interest Banks pay customers.
@bea4anrq12 The thing that bothers me is, for an infinitely old universe to be possible, the universe would have had to been around infinity days ago. The problem is, if you try to follow time backwards - to infinity days ago from today, you'd never reach infinity days ago, even if you went back at a rate of a Googolplex centuries per nanosecond. You can only approach infinity. So, if the universe was around infinity ago, time would have never reached today's date. :( or maybe i'm dumb
Largest number ever given name is Graham's number. It's so vast that you couldn't even display it using expoents on exponents on one page. Way bigger than Googolplex.
@drmoroe30 "Grahams Number" drawfs a Googolplex and it has been used in a practical mathematical calculation.. though im not sure what it calculates. Noone knows the full value of Grahams Number... only the last few thousand digits (not the first digits)
Dr. Sagan had a sense of humor, didn't he? Such a genius. I would have loved to been in his class he taught at Cambridge University in ithica, New York. I understand that his classes had wait lists after his show aired! Would'nt that have been cool to have had Carl for a teacher!? Great things he tried to teach us!
I once heard an approximation of a googolplex that I took at face-value: imagine if the entire universe were stuffed with dust particles only a few micrometers wide. The first single particle would be 1, the second 2, and so on. The total number of possibilities of arranging these particles in the universe approached a googolplex.
Heads up guys, theres a sequel to Sagan's "cosmos" planned for a 2013 release that will be produced by Ann Druyan (sagan's widow) and Seth McFarlene. And the host will be Neil Degrasse Tyson.
... (many of which are far, far bigger)... but while I completely agreed with you when I first watched this video, looking into these numbers and just the monumental numbers required to increase powers when you reach 10^80, I think it's sensible to agree that there may not be a googolplex particles in the Universe.
they are there to show distress and anger rather than insult people though i find, when they turn to insulting people its generally the last refuge of the stupid
Numberphile touched on this, too. The number is vastly larger than anything we could begin to comprehend, the googolplex. Nothing we will ever do during our existence will ever achieve such a superastronomical number.
Need some help here, I'm not sure I understand this correctly. If I would write down a googol and then exchange every zero with a googol, would that be a googolplex? Complex stuff, that's for sure.
Im surprise no one has typed on out yet. would take a while but it can actually be done, unless for some ungodly reason the file size would be way too big lol
Just because we cease to be conscious doesn't make 'nothing' exist. Was there 'nothing' before you were born? Do you recall a moment before your life where you witnessed a googolplex?
If you think googol and googolplex are huge enough, wait until you hear giggol and giggolplex, gaggol and gaggolplex, geegol and geegolplex etc. Those numbers require you to understand a more powerful, Knuth up-arrow notation.
@myrtlebox You are correct - there are many brilliant people out there, but the difference between these individuals and Carl Sagan is that he had the power to explain even the most complex subject in the simplest terms so that even non-gifted individuals could understand, learn, and possibly explain to someone else. That is what makes Carl Sagan stand out. Having a TV show didn't hurt either! :D
I like the elegant way Carl links his zeroes with a top line.
"Fortunately, there's a simpler, more precise way of writing a Googolplex."
Guy who wrote Googolplex on paper roll: "GODDAMMIT!"
Salacious T Hahahahahaha
well.. he didn't exactly write googolplex on that paper.. faaaar from it lol
🤣🤣
@@JohanLGT its sarcasm
"A googolplex is as precisely as far from infinity as is the number one." Mindblown.
lol i like ur profile i actually tried to swat the screen
Look up Graham's number and have your mind REALLY blown.
Graham's number is as precisely as far from infinity as is the number one :)
and half of infinity is still infinity. You divide it by any number, or subtract any number from it and its size does not shrink.
And if you consider that there is an infinite number of whole numbers, between each of those infinite whole numbers, there is an infinite number of fractions...
It's really cool how he draws his zeros connected - sweet math handwriting
Challenge accepted:
A little while ago, I printed out the largest prime number (because I'm a big nerd) on standard 8.5x11 paper at 3-point font, with half-inch margins. Tiny, but still large enough to read by the naked eye (and large enough for the printer to print legibly). It took about 175 pages, front and back. The largest prime is 22,338,618 digits long, giving 22,338,618 digits / 175 pages.
22,338,618 is 10^7.35, which means I need 10^92.65 times as many pages as before to print a googleplex. 175 pages x 10^92.65 is 10^94.89 pages. A single page is about 30 mm^3 in volume. Thus, this would require a volume of 30 mm^3 / page * 10^94.89 pages is 10^96.37 mm^3 total. One light-year is 9.46 x 10^18 mm, so that equates out to volume of 2.77 x 10^39 ly^3, which is a cube 140 TRILLION light-years on each side.
If the stack of paper were the size of a house, the visible universe would be the size of a small marble. Can't be stuffed into the universe, indeed.
Thanks for your diligence but I'm guessing you don't have a girlfriend. Lol
@@jafmoveez2446 yeah, i also think so
@@jafmoveez2446 girlfriend is temporary, knowledge is eternal xD
This, this is an important comment
@@kishaloyb.7937 Unless, perhaps, that knowledge is incomplete. We only have "known" largest prime numbers. There are msot certainly larger. Our friend here is very outdated already.
Ok, so, mindblown. Thanks. But still been trying to wrap my head around this for about two days now. So I opened an excel sheet and typed the number one. Then below it typed =A1*2 and dragged that formula to repeat itself to see how far it would go. After just the hundred trillions, excel gets lazy and just adds zeros to the back of the numbers and that's just 1*10^15. After 1*10^145 the numbers didn't fit on the screen and after 9*10^307 it just reads error. So I tried Word. typed a page of zeros at 8 pt font then copied and pasted it. Did that for 10 pages then copied and pasted that till 100 pages etc etc. After 20,000 pages I only have 150,000,000 zeros an that's just 1.5*10^8 and the computer takes almost two minutes to load a new paste.I love that I can put in a simple math idea and crash my computer.
you are amazing :)
Because it sticks in my head the most, I believe that this was the first episode of Cosmos I watched back in '80.
It also introduced me to classical music. The Haydn Trumpet Concerto remains my favorite piece.
Thanks, Dr. Sagan!
You keep believing, I'll keep evolving! awesome quote
RIP Carl Sagan. As a young person at the time, I found his series, Cosmos,to be thoroughly enthralling. It ignited in me an insatiable desire to learn about Science. He was a superlative teacher and one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century. A true genius.
Carl still dropping knowledge. Thank you!!
"What do you do for a living?"
"I work with Carl Sagan."
"That must be cool."
"He gave me a roll of paper and told me to write a googolplex on it."
"Seriously?"
"Yup. Worst. Boss. Ever."
I've always found Sagan's statement "A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1" to be a very profound statement.
Genius. I need to buy this series on DVD. I've forgotten how much pure intellectual gold is in it. Thanks asantos for the upload. I was laughing all the way through. Carl = legend x 10 ^ Googplex.
It’s on Amazon for $35 🤘
This dude took: "Oh you like math? Then name every number." To the next fucking level
@Spartank43x because he wasnt alluding to the googol with that, but the googolplex.
I recall this episode originally airing. The brain remembers when we learn strange words like Googolplex!
Cosmos, even if it is a few decades old, should be seen by all. What a wonderful series that provokes thought and logic. Carl Sagan was a great person influencing countless people. Much respect to him and those that follow in his footsteps like Neil Tyson Degrasse... wish our media would promote this stuff more instead of ignorance.
googol > google
Google play
@@brawlstarsyt7981 Google Music no longer exists.
I’ve used this example (what is, and how large is a Googolplex) as a “nugget of thought” when teaching engineering courses. It never fails to blow a few minds in the classroom. Inevitably there is a student who smugly doubts the immensity of a Googolplex, and who promises to “come back tomorrow” with a better, more suitable way to write it down. They return for the next class and sheepishly admit they laid awake more than once trying to picture this number in their head only to gradually realize they are dealing with an incredible size that cannot be dealt with outside of the way/method DR Sagan provides.
When I was a kid in the 80’s, my father would sit me down to watch Sagan on PBS. We saw this specific episode on its original broadcast. The next school day I told my friends mom I had learned the word “googol,” and she told me to “Stop using baby talk.” It’s my dad’s favorite story about my youth and education.
"Googol PLEXSSS"
Infinity gives us an endless source of amazement LOL.
I love how he says googol the first time. I watched "Cosmos" when I was a teenager. Brilliant man!
The Sagan version or the Tyson version?
I remember watching this episode as a kid, it really got stuck in my head.
I could listen to Carl Sagan's voice forever. Don't even care what he is saying. Well, I prefer he speak about science, but I'd take whatever!
Everything this man says inspires me.
If you are reading this comment how are you now
The most compelling response to the futility of writing out a googolplex would be to say, "Well why not make the zeros really small or write on incredibly thin paper".....until you do the math. The known Universe is ~ 10^78 m3. If we were to divide it up into a googol boxes, a box for each zero, then each box would be ~ 10^-22m3. That's roughly the size of a hydrogen atom. Put another way you could just about cram a googol H atoms into the known universe with no spaces in between.
Whenever Sagan's eyes meet the camera in this, or any other video, I feel supremely inadequate.
Such a monument to modern science.
RIP
Absolutely, it's very baffling but I'd love to find out some of this stuff.
In case anyone was wondering (i know i was) the music is Haydn's trumpet concerto E flat 3rd mov
FYI that number would be much more than 100,000 zeros following the 1. 100,000 zeros is 10^5^1 which is much less than even 10^10^1, much less 10^10^10.
That explanation of Graham's number's size doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of it!
Loved his work
when your dead, your dead, you are exactly like everything and everyone around you. without the little particles and atoms in your head to know what was going on,you would be like you were before you were born,unable to think, unable to know, unable to do anything. we are equal to this universe, we are nothing special.we are like the plants, the animals, and the planets. we are just parts of this amazing and beautiful universe. and we are able to have the gift to know how it works. -Carl Sagan
Evolutionary Theory fully rejects the concept of irreducible complexity, whereas ID is dependent on it.
There's your paradox. How do you reconcile acceptance of both?
What's larger: a Googolplex or Graham's Number? My mind is too small to even consider the notion of thinking of dreaming about coming up with an idea of a method to develop a way of thinking about pondering the conception of a thought to start deciphering a way to even begin considering calculating the first few digits of either of these numbers.
Grahams number is equally as close to infinite as a Googolplex as 1 as well.
I think its amazing though that Grahams number ends with a 7, so no matter how much time it would take to write it, you would eventually in a seemingly incredibly long time finish writing it.
But in the time it would take you to write that, you could write it again a Grahams number amount of times and still at that point be as close to infinite as Grahams number, Googolplex and indeed.... ONE.
Couuld it be the same thing with lightspeed? As Carl Sagan explained in earlier episodes, you can only approach the speed of light, but you can never get there (as far as we know now). Maybe those are just the boundaries nature has set for us.
An all-seasons classic
What did I learn today? That you can "Stack" exponents. I didn't knw that you could write 10 ^(10^100) like that. It must make for some mind twisting math to keep that straight.
Wait until you get a load of Graham's number en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number it's so big that stacking exponents isn't enough to express it. It needs to use en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation
_A number one followed by one hundred zeroes is known by what name?_ is the question that won Charles Ingram a one followed by six zeroes (in pound sterling), after a great deal of prevaricating.
I knew the answer instantly, having watched _Cosmos_ some twenty years previously.
Of course it didn't do him much good, as he soon had it taken away from him.
"The total number of elementary particles ... in the accessable universe is of the order of 10^80." I'd love to see the calculations on that one.
@lzoli18B
It was a joke - he said "we STARTED to write it". Remember a googol is MANY times greater than the number of elementary particles in the known universe, and a googolplex is 10 to the POWER of that many. So it's 1 followed by more zeroes than there are particles in the known universe.
@TensorKhan Just think, the number of zeros written would exceed the number of elementary particles in the universe by a factor of a googol minus 80.
@takkie23 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 about 1.51 × 1092 years, which is 1.1 × 1082 times the age of the universe, to write a googolplex.
@kaneda956 A duotrigintillion is the name given to 10^99 - so using the same common system, 10^100 is equal to ten duotrigintillion. A "googol" is just a simpler, more commonly used name for this same number
Exponentiation is notably not associative, 10^10^100 can have two radically different meanings. (10^10)^100=10^1000, which would be 1 followed by a thousand zeros. But a googolplex is 10^(10^100).
How can you say any number larger than one is the exact same distance from infinity?
Like he said even though a googol plex is large 1 is exactly the same distance from infinity.
It is exactly 1 googol plex -1 closer. But infinity isn't any closer.
hey! I just answered my own question but it is still a paradox.
Does MS Word have some kind of internal compression algorithm? It seems to me that to write it in a text file, it'd require a googol bytes, which is a substantially larger amount of storage.
...if we assume that there are another 250b galaxies (so, 500 billion galaxies in total, as some German scientists' supercomputer concluded recently), then that number only changes to 4.374 * 10^84 atoms. Assuming there are 300 particles in an atom, then you have ~1.31 * 10^87 particles in the Universe.
Very approximate obviously, as there's no constant number of particles per atom, plus 500b galaxies isn't a confirmed number, and I assumed that all galaxies are the same size as the Milky Way...
You have earned my subscription for knowing about elocution, not a word commonly used in the smoko room at my place of work : )
The video cut out suddenly because the guy they got to write out the googolplex ran in and punched Sagan.
I think Google is listening to my conversations through my smart phone. I was just talking about Googol & Googolplex this morning. This is not the first time something like this has happened.
A googolplex light years and a googolplex nanometers will barely make any difference. That is the really cool bit.
Check out Graham's number, it makes the googolplex look like 0.
Parabéns pelo trabalho pesquisei muito sobre Carl Sagan e à Palavra Google até q achei esse vídeo Parabéns.
Is that Cambridge (UK) where he tries to unfurl the roll of paper?
@vskynet This question is difficult to understand.
Are you asking if zero equals other numbers? No.
Your mistake seems to be that you think you can somehow "divide" a digit of a larger number of existence as if it were a multiplication.
You can't.
10 does not equal 1 times 0, it equals ten.
i love the way he writes his zeros.
You see 10^4 is 10 times more larger than 10^3.
As the higher you go in powers the numbers get mind numbingly large, and every increasing power increases that by a fold of 10. The number they came up with is an average, they take in account the averages of many objects in the universe. Who knows how accurate it is. But it must be within a certain range atleast such that many of them agree on it.
Carl always makes me learn new things, man
Why would you want to make a number like the googolplex? What is the use of it? If the number of elementary particles in the universe is "only" 10^80, why would you make a number as big as 10^10^100?
@ChocolateEater21 Unfortunately it didn't help me:(
You said "A googolplex is the number 1, followed by a googol amount of zeroes after it."
But a googol is 1 followed by 100 zeroes, so the way I understand it a googol and googolplex is the same thing, but that's not correct either.
I am sure I read or saw on another UA-cam channel that a larger number was something like Aleph Null? If i said that word correctly.
@crazygeo81 Just because all numbers are a bunch of ones added together, doesn't mean 1 is the only number. And just because they are the same distance from infinity doesn't make them the same number.
The Googlexplex article on Wikipedia has a fairly good demonstration of that.
@crocfme no he said that the number of atoms in the known universe was 10 to the 80th power... less than a Googol and by far less than a googolplex...
Faultered in the end; 10^10^100 is not a googolplex, it is merely 10000000000^100. He should have used parentheses around the last numbers.
Let's just say that the volume for said apple pie is 15*10*5cm, then the Earth would be 1.463 * 10^19 times as big as the apple pie, which would give the Earth something like 1.463 * 10^45 atoms. Multiply that by 1.3 million and you have 1.9019 * 10^51 atoms in the Sun. Then, the number of atoms in our galaxy is approximately 8.74874 * 10^72.
If we assume there are ~250b galaxies in the universe, there'd be ~2.187 * 10^84 atoms. At this point...
@teejayandjon i know right.. i was wondering who put those zeros on the paper. you know sagan didnt do it.
@Flopieto
Because infinity goes on forever.....there is even a number called a Flopieto. And even a OOBilly. Both make a googlplex seem like the amount of interest Banks pay customers.
@bea4anrq12
The thing that bothers me is, for an infinitely old universe to be possible, the universe would have had to been around infinity days ago.
The problem is, if you try to follow time backwards - to infinity days ago from today, you'd never reach infinity days ago, even if you went back at a rate of a Googolplex centuries per nanosecond. You can only approach infinity.
So, if the universe was around infinity ago, time would have never reached today's date. :( or maybe i'm dumb
There's something oddly entertaining about listening to Carl Sagan :)
Largest number ever given name is Graham's number. It's so vast that you couldn't even display it using expoents on exponents on one page. Way bigger than Googolplex.
@drmoroe30 "Grahams Number" drawfs a Googolplex and it has been used in a practical mathematical calculation.. though im not sure what it calculates. Noone knows the full value of Grahams Number... only the last few thousand digits (not the first digits)
Dr. Sagan had a sense of humor, didn't he? Such a genius. I would have loved to been in his class he taught at Cambridge University in ithica, New York. I understand that his classes had wait lists after his show aired! Would'nt that have been cool to have had Carl for a teacher!? Great things he tried to teach us!
That's Cornell University in Ithaca NY. Cambridge is in the UK.
I once heard an approximation of a googolplex that I took at face-value: imagine if the entire universe were stuffed with dust particles only a few micrometers wide. The first single particle would be 1, the second 2, and so on. The total number of possibilities of arranging these particles in the universe approached a googolplex.
@quiz0walkthroughs, he didn't actually write a googolplex on that paper
Heads up guys, theres a sequel to Sagan's "cosmos" planned for a 2013 release that will be produced by Ann Druyan (sagan's widow) and Seth McFarlene. And the host will be Neil Degrasse Tyson.
I clicked on this video only to hear Carl Sagan say "GOOGOL"
... (many of which are far, far bigger)... but while I completely agreed with you when I first watched this video, looking into these numbers and just the monumental numbers required to increase powers when you reach 10^80, I think it's sensible to agree that there may not be a googolplex particles in the Universe.
they are there to show distress and anger rather than insult people though i find, when they turn to insulting people its generally the last refuge of the stupid
Are those BloodAngels on the table in front of Carl when he writes the googleplex?
I like how he wrote his zeros.
Numberphile touched on this, too. The number is vastly larger than anything we could begin to comprehend, the googolplex.
Nothing we will ever do during our existence will ever achieve such a superastronomical number.
Need some help here, I'm not sure I understand this correctly. If I would write down a googol and then exchange every zero with a googol, would that be a googolplex?
Complex stuff, that's for sure.
Im surprise no one has typed on out yet. would take a while but it can actually be done, unless for some ungodly reason the file size would be way too big lol
@michaelfarm a googol is not a useless number. For example there are 1.193 googol possible chess games...
Now, what about 10^100^10^100 (Googol^Googol)?
Evan y u do dis?
devourtheirsouls Because I can.
***** Dunno.
***** y u do dis?
Googolplexian
Agent Smith took elocution lessons from CarlSagan.
@Xanatos712 Graham's number is the largest usable/useful number known to man. It is by far bigger than a googolplex.
Just because we cease to be conscious doesn't make 'nothing' exist. Was there 'nothing' before you were born? Do you recall a moment before your life where you witnessed a googolplex?
It's not a real number but it's still a number. And if you don't like infinity, what about Graham's Number?
Is a Googolplex a 1 followed by a 1 and a 100 zeroes?
If you think googol and googolplex are huge enough, wait until you hear giggol and giggolplex, gaggol and gaggolplex, geegol and geegolplex etc.
Those numbers require you to understand a more powerful, Knuth up-arrow notation.
So then what was the point of the googel number? Was he actually using it for anything?
Reminded of this video after watching Squid Game.
@myrtlebox You are correct - there are many brilliant people out there, but the difference between these individuals and Carl Sagan is that he had the power to explain even the most complex subject in the simplest terms so that even non-gifted individuals could understand, learn, and possibly explain to someone else. That is what makes Carl Sagan stand out. Having a TV show didn't hurt either! :D
How do we know how many elementary particles are in the entire universe?
could you write out the zeroes please?
in school this might bore me, with sagan its a great journey to knowledge