|
that's a very big number - but way short of the biggest finite number that can be attached to a known physical process.
John D Barrow identified a number that has empirical significance = 10 raised to the power of 70,000,000,000,000 (10^70 trillion)
What does it represent? Well it has to do with the total number of different combinations that the human brain can arrange its neurons. Here is a short description of how the number is arrived at.
..... Mike Holderness suggested (in Holderness, M., “Think of a Number,” New Scientist, 16 June 2001, p. 45) that one way of estimating the number of possible thoughts that a brain could conceive is to count all those connections. The brain can do many things at once so we could view it as some number, say a thousand, little groups of neurons. If each neuron makes a thousand different links to the ten million others in the same [neuron] group then the number of different ways in which it could make connections in the same neuron group is 10^7 x 10^7 x 10^7 x … one thousand times. This gives 10^7000 possible patterns of connections. But this is just the number for one neuron group. The total number for 10^7 neurons is 10^7000 multiplied together by 10^7 times. This is 10^70,000,000,000. If the 1000 or so groups of neurons can operate independently of each other then each of them contributes 10^70,000,000,000 possible wirings, increasing the total to the Holderness number, 10^70,000,000,000,000. This is the modern estimate of the number of different electrical patterns that the brain could hold. In some sense it is the number of different possible thoughts or ideas that a human brain could.”
|