The scale of the universe

[Terry B]

This is a very clever animation that shows the biggest and the smallest.
http://htwins.net/scale/

[CraigS]

Hi Terry;

Extremely cool.
Thanks for that.

Cheers

[shelltree (Shelley)]

Wow, that really puts things in perspective. Very very cool and a tad daunting too!

[Liz]

That is amazing Terry, thankyou.
Geeze, have never heard of a yoctometer, and how large FM radio waves are, and much more!!!

[Jen]

wow, thats really cool

[Baddad (Marty)]

Hi Terry B,

That is a clever way to try to put it in perpective. Numbers of that magnitude at the extremeties of the scale are simply way out for me to comprehend. No matter how they are presented.

Even one million is a large number. Too large to really imagine.

For example: You are given one million, one dollar coins. To Count. At one per second (slow counter)

You work 8 hours per day counting. 7 days a wk.
It will take 5 weeks to count your loot. Or 11.57... man days.

And that is only one million

Do you now see why the numbers in that interesting link of Terry's are just beyond me. My brain starts to hurt.

Thanks Terry, I liked the names of those numbers.

Here's one : What is the name given to the largest number with a name?
Also what was the event to how it was awarded its name?

Cheers

[erick (Eric)]

As a kid I set off to count to some huge number - I guess it was a million. I remember I got to 1,100 after some time and then asked my big brother how much longer I would have to count. He explained powers of ten to me and .............I gave up counting!

Thanks Terry for the great link - as much entertaining as it is informative!

[M54 (Molly)]

Thanks for that Terry.
Fascinating to keep panning in and out!

Does anyone get the feeling that it might go on forever, inwards and outwards.

[renormalised (Carl)]

Yep...64 orders of magnitude difference between the smallest and the largest (but that's only for the observable universe, which is itself only a minuscule fraction of the size of the entire universe). Considering how flat the spacetime geometry of the observable universe is, the entire universe is most likely many thousands of times larger still.

Actually, just thinking about it, it's most likely even larger still. Consider this, during the time of inflation (between 10E-36 to 10E-32 secs) the bubble that was the observable universe expanded 50 orders of magnitude in size, from an object at Planck Scale (10E-35m) to something around 10E12km in size. Now, if the order of magnitude size between the smallest and largest objects is 64 orders of magnitude, and the expansion during inflation mirrored that size increase overall, and was still applicable to the scale today, then it's possible that the entire universe as a whole maybe 14 orders of magnitude larger than our observable universe. In that incredibly short period of time during inflation (something like 0.00000000000000000000000000000001 secs), the entire universe expanded from that same point like object to how big our observable universe is at present....around 98 billion light years across. Sort of leaves the Starship Enterprise lying in its wake as far as warp speeds go!!!

That incredibly short time period for inflation, if you can't think of it in its natural terms, think of it like this....if at 10E-36 sec was day 1 when you were born, then by the time you reached 10E-32 sec you'd have gone through 27.4 years of your life

[gary]

Hi Terry,

I believe the link to that web site has been posted here in the past on IIS, but it
is a good one and worth repeating.

It is reminiscent of the famous Powers of Ten short documentary made by
Ray Eames and her husband Charles for IBM in the late 60's.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUeFzvHz8Bw

[Terry B]

Originally Posted by gary

Hi Terry,

I believe the link to that web site has been posted here in the past on IIS, but it
is a good one and worth repeating.

It is reminiscent of the famous Powers of Ten short documentary made by
Ray Eames and her husband Charles for IBM in the late 60's.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUeFzvHz8Bw

It may well have been. I didn't do a search. Still pretty nice site I think.

[Baddad (Marty)]

Hi Terry, Hi All,
Still no answer to the question. The largest number with a name.
Cheers

[sjastro]

Originally Posted by Baddad

Hi Terry, Hi All,
Still no answer to the question. The largest number with a name.
Cheers

A googolplex.

Steven

[CraigS]

Originally Posted by sjastro

A googolplex.

Steven

"A googolplex is the number 10googol, i.e. 10e10e100, which can also be written as the number 1 followed by a googol zeros (i.e. 10e100 zeros)."
Wikipedia

Pretty big !!

Cheers

[renormalised (Carl)]

Originally Posted by sjastro

A googolplex.

Steven

Now, that begs the question, what would you call a googleplex to the power of a googleplex....a "googoolyplex"???

[CraigS]

Originally Posted by renormalised

Now, that begs the question, what would you call a googleplex to the power of a googleplex....a "googoolyplex"???

Sounds like a hair's breadth away from infinity to me !

[renormalised (Carl)]

It's as close to infinity as zero, the difference doesn't matter

[sjastro]

Originally Posted by CraigS

"A googolplex is the number 10googol, i.e. 10e10e100, which can also be written as the number 1 followed by a googol zeros (i.e. 10e100 zeros)."
Wikipedia

Pretty big !!

Cheers

Archimedes who is considered the third greatest mathematician of all time after Gauss and Newton came up with the number 1 followed by 80 thousand billion zeros. Not bad for an age when a number larger than 3 was considered enormous.

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

Regards

Steven

[sjastro]

Originally Posted by renormalised

Now, that begs the question, what would you call a googleplex to the power of a googleplex....a "googoolyplex"???

I'd call it a headache.

Regards

Steven

[renormalised (Carl)]

Probably more like a migraine