And now some really big numbers - October 16, 2009
It's time for big number madness here on the Great Beyond.
The first number is 243,112,609-1. If you crunch that out you'll get a 12 million digit prime. Primes that can be written as a power of two (minus the one) are called Mersenne Primes, and this one was discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a UCLA project to pin down the Mersennes. It was discovered last year, but this week it spontaneously generated a smaller but more useful number: $100,000. That's the money awarded to the GIMP's team by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as part of their cooperative computing award.
The second, even larger number, comes from a new paper on the arXiv preprint server (and via the always helpful arXiv blog):
That's the number of universes that could exist if a theory known as inflation is correct. According to inflation, the universe began as a frothy foam of different quantum states that, during a period of rapid expansion, became "frozen" in space. Andre Linde and Vitaly Vanchirum of Stanford University estimated the number of frozen states that could have been created. Since each state is now a separate region of space with its own laws of physics, they argue that they can now be thought of as "separate" universes.
Even if we could see other universes, and there's no reason to think that we can, the authors believe we couldn't take it all in. Our brains could only "observe" 101016 universes in a normal lifetime.
Want more numbers? Watch this:
Comments
I read the paper you included with the link, and it makes no sense to me. Sometimes I think that I live in some kind of Truman Show-esq world, and stuff like that is there just to make me look ridiculously stupid.
Posted by: Pepe Silvia | October 16, 2009 05:11 PM
Much smaller of course would be a googol 10^100, or a googolplex 10^10^100.
Posted by: zanardm | October 20, 2009 06:41 AM