Very Large Numbers.

You know me, always blathering on about infinity this or infinity that.  But in a way numbers that are Very Large are even more interesting.  Hey, I see you out there rolling your eyes, but bear with me on this.

While doing research on nonce words I discovered that there are lots more such words in play than just “quark”.  Back in the early 20th century the 9-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner was asked by his uncle to give a name to a very large number, in this case the number “1” followed by 100 zeroes or 10¹⁰⁰.  The nephew came up with Googol to describe this number.

Many years later the founders of you favorite Internet search company wanted to name their venture “Googol” but found that word was already in the English lexicon, so they altered it to Google.  The rest is history.

Anyway back to a googol.  How large is this number?  One way to think about it is consider that if the known universe were completely filled with sand, that would constitute “only” around 10⁹⁶ grains of sand!  So a Googol is a really, really big number.

That same 9-year-old was asked to think about an even larger number, and he thought of the number “1” followed by a googol number of zeroes or 10^Googol. He called this unimaginably large number a Googolplex.  And to bring you full circle, the headquarters building of Google in Mountain View California is called, you guessed it, Googleplex.

if you tried to write down in long form the number represented by a googolplex, you would run out of space in the known universe before finishing.  You would also run out of time as it would take longer than the projected heat death of the universe.