Maatthew
New member
This thread is dedicated to one of, in my opinion, the most mind boggling concepts in math and science. A googol as you may already be familiar with is 10^100 or simply a 1 with a hundred 0's behind it, not too complicated right?
Well this is where it get's crazy, a googolplex, written as 10^{10^{100}} in scientific notation, is a 1 followed by a googol zeros. This may be hard to wrap you mind about so I will give you an example on a smaller scale. Think on a million, which is 1 with six 0's behind it, or 1,000,000. Now try writing a million 0's behind it. Maybe that helped.
A googlolplex is such a large number that according to Carl Sagan's estimation's, to write it out in number form would be impossible because it would require more space than the known universe provides.
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 1.51×10^92 years, which is about 1.1×10^82 times the age of the universe, to write a googolplex.
A Planck space has a volume of a Planck length cubed, which is the smallest measurable volume, which is approximately 4.222×10^−105 m3 = 4.222×10^−99 cm3. Thus 2.5 cm^3 contain about a googol Planck spaces. There are only about 3×10^80 cubic metres in the observed universe, making the number of Planck spaces in the universe to be about 7.1×10184 quantum spaces in the observed universe, so a googolplex is far larger than even the number of the smallest spaces in the observed universe.
This may be hard for anyone to wrap their mind around it, but I find it fascinating about how large the concept of a Googolplex is. You can also use this thread is just for discussion about fascinating concepts of math and science.