Funny you should mention that. I personally stepped on that land mine in the 1980's while playing Scrabble with my Jewish friend. But for all I know he was just pretending to be offended to keep me from getting the points.
million, billion, trillion... then what?
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1 person spells googol correctly. A few posts later 2 people misspell it as google.
Is this a joke???
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Not to mention he got it wrong: A googolplex = 10^googol, not googol^googol.
I remember on "The Simpsons," their town had a multiplex movie theater so big that it was called the Googolplex.
I remember on "The Simpsons," their town had a multiplex movie theater so big that it was called the Googolplex.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Some people become influential, and words they use catch on. Perhaps QW will be one of them. Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed is credited with naming "rock and roll" music.
Perhaps the word camplex will catch on.
Well thx for helping me out guys, the reason i came here was because I was looking something up on supernovas and it said that the power of a supernova is
one-million tons of TNT. So out of curiosity I figured out how much fire-power that would be and it was:1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, and i thought to myself WTF? How do i pronounce that...? So i looked it up and found that it was one-hundred septillion in the U.S. Ty, Ty.
one-million tons of TNT. So out of curiosity I figured out how much fire-power that would be and it was:1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, and i thought to myself WTF? How do i pronounce that...? So i looked it up and found that it was one-hundred septillion in the U.S. Ty, Ty.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
That can't be right. We've built nuclear bombs that produce the energy of fifty million tons (they're called "megatons") of TNT.
I don't understand. You seem to have some mistakes or omissions in your transcription. How does that number represent one million tons?
Another transcription error. The number you wrote is one octillion in the U.S and France. One hundred septillion would have one less zero.
And the units of "fire power" would be....?
As I've always understood it, 1,000,000 = 1 million
1,000,000,000 = 1 thousand million (in the old British system of counting)
1,000,000,000,000 = 1 billion (1 million multiplied by itself, hence 10^12)
therefore, using that system 1 million^3 = 1 trillion (10^18)
1 quadillion = 1 million^4 (10^24)
1 quintillion = 1 million^5 (10^30)
1 sextillion = 1 million ^6 (10^ 36)
1 septillion = 1 million^7 (10^42)
1 octillion = 1 million^8 (10^48)
1 nontillion = 1 million^9 (10^54)
1 dectillion = 1 million^10 (10^60) (or decatillion)
1,000,000,000 = 1 thousand million (in the old British system of counting)
1,000,000,000,000 = 1 billion (1 million multiplied by itself, hence 10^12)
therefore, using that system 1 million^3 = 1 trillion (10^18)
1 quadillion = 1 million^4 (10^24)
1 quintillion = 1 million^5 (10^30)
1 sextillion = 1 million ^6 (10^ 36)
1 septillion = 1 million^7 (10^42)
1 octillion = 1 million^8 (10^48)
1 nontillion = 1 million^9 (10^54)
1 dectillion = 1 million^10 (10^60) (or decatillion)
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
You've got the British/German paradigm right but some of the words are slightly off. It's quadrillion, nonillion and decillion. From "trillion" forward, the morphemes are taken from the Latin series of ordinal numbers.
I've been told that the British are grudgingly adopting our definition of "billion." There are now so many people with wealth in excess of $1,000,000,000 that we need a name for them, and "thousand-millionaire" just isn't euphonious--and it doesn't fit very well into a headline either. So they've started using the American word "billionaire."
eburacum45
Valued Senior Member
We've been using Billion= 10e9 since the '80s at least. Old billions are rarely used these days.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Yeah, that's about when billionaires became plentiful enough to be spoken about generically. Today there are almost four hundred in the USA and more than two hundred in the rest of the world. (Net worth measured in US dollars.)
Do you still call 10^18 a trillion? If so, what are 10^12 and 10^15?
Yeah, I get the impression that the only place people actually use the "milliard" and "thousand million" and so on is in internet threads like this one.
Wow I just wanted to know what came after a trillion but I learned alot more than that from this thread but I dont think there is a finate number just throw a zero at the end and you can keep going for eternity. I dont see how atoms has anything to do with how high a number can go
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Even if it did, it's easy to transcend that limit. Count the number of possible paths through the universe if you visit every atom once.
Then save your descriptions of each path in a catalog and count the number of ways you could sort the catalog. That becomes the data that comprises a new catalog, which you can sort...
Hi scott1987. I was trying to find the post that you mention showing how atoms have something to do with how high a number can go. Was it on this thread? Link?
True, we would be able to get some pretty high numbers using just that one method. But still I think that the number would be finite if the number of atoms in the universe at any point in time is finite (I find that debatable) and if you could keep all of the original atoms in the set while you wile away your time constructing and sorting.
Even adding zeros would always result in a finite number ... unless like scott1987 suggests, you could keep adding zeros for eternity. Since eternity is itself an infinite, then the limit that you approach as you move toward eternity by adding zeros is an infinite number. But you never get to eternity and so you never reach the infinite limit and would therefore always have an finite number at any point prior to eternity. I think that is an example of the reason that "infinite" is a concept and never a reality. What says you FR?
So any Smart and clever people here that can tell us how many pennies would it take to cover the entire earth,i penny high? Me don't :shrug:
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
It's not that the number of atoms in the universe sets a natural limit on the size of numbers. Numbers, like all mathematics, are abstractions after all. That's why mathematical theories can be proven absolutely true, whereas scientific theories can only be proven true beyond a reasonable doubt and are in fact occasionally falsified. Mathematical theories are derived from abstractions, rather than from empirical observations of the natural universe.
I'm not going to look this up--I'll leave that for one of you young'uns with nothing to do but play videogames--but as I recall it was absurdly easy to write a number that is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. It may have been a googolplex, 10^[10^(10^2)], one with a googol zeros.
Well of course: all numbers are finite. The eight on its side representing infinity is not a number, it's a mathematical symbol. Some mathematical symbols like pi and e are numbers, to be sure, but not all of them.
Why? I have never encountered a model of the natural universe which contains an infinite number of atoms. Have you?
Then it's not really a limit, is it? Don't try to get away with that statement on my board (Linguistics).
As I said, mathematics deals with abstractions--concepts. Those abstractions or concepts map very well to the natural universe, which is why mathematics is so useful. One cow plus one cow always equals two cows. But not all of those abstractions map so closely to physical objects. Infinity is one that does not. That doesn't make it any less useful, especially to scientists.
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