<story><title>If you put chalk under a powerful microscope</title><url>https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1022534132415356928</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>perl4ever</author><text>Re &amp;quot;big&amp;quot; numbers, I can&amp;#x27;t help thinking of Richard Feynman&amp;#x27;s comment &amp;quot;There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it&amp;#x27;s only a hundred billion. It&amp;#x27;s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The entire universe probably contains around 10^80 protons, yet Google&amp;#x27;s founders casually referred to the number 10^100 to indicate their ambitions for information processing.&lt;p&gt;A carbon atom is 0.3 nm in diameter, so only about 3.3 million can fit in 1 mm. There are well over twice the number of people in NYC!&lt;p&gt;All in all, numbers that describe the natural world aren&amp;#x27;t all that impressive compared to the human world.</text></item><item><author>latch</author><text>I read Dragon&amp;#x27;s Egg recently, and one of the key leap from barbarian to civilization that the neutron star aliens make is (simplistically) to count past &amp;quot;many&amp;quot; and think of quantities &amp;#x2F; numbers abstractly.&lt;p&gt;Our ability to track distinct objects is impressive by our own standard, and we&amp;#x27;re pretty good at understanding &amp;quot;big&amp;quot; numbers, say somewhere between a million and a billion. But in the scale of things, we&amp;#x27;re much closer to the hunter knowing his kill will feed his tribe for many moons versus being a starfaring race.</text></item><item><author>dwaltrip</author><text>Each &amp;quot;star&amp;quot; in the Hubble Deep Field image is actually an entire galaxy... The vastness of the universe is difficult to comprehend.</text></item><item><author>nikanj</author><text>Contrast this with the Hubble Deep Field image, which is an extremely tiny patch of the night sky. It’s sizeis equivalent to a tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres, or ~110 yards.&lt;p&gt;And my god, it’s full of stars. There’s endless detail in the universe, whether you zoom in, or zoom out.&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&amp;#x2F;wikipedia&amp;#x2F;commons&amp;#x2F;6&amp;#x2F;69&amp;#x2F;NASA-HS201427a-HubbleUltraDeepField2014-20140603.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&amp;#x2F;wikipedia&amp;#x2F;commons&amp;#x2F;6&amp;#x2F;69&amp;#x2F;NASA-HS2...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>majewsky</author><text>&amp;gt; A carbon atom is 0.3 nm in diameter, so only about 3.3 million can fit in 1 mm.&lt;p&gt;Sure, but about 70 quintillion of them fit in 1 mm^3.</text></comment>
<story><title>If you put chalk under a powerful microscope</title><url>https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1022534132415356928</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>perl4ever</author><text>Re &amp;quot;big&amp;quot; numbers, I can&amp;#x27;t help thinking of Richard Feynman&amp;#x27;s comment &amp;quot;There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it&amp;#x27;s only a hundred billion. It&amp;#x27;s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The entire universe probably contains around 10^80 protons, yet Google&amp;#x27;s founders casually referred to the number 10^100 to indicate their ambitions for information processing.&lt;p&gt;A carbon atom is 0.3 nm in diameter, so only about 3.3 million can fit in 1 mm. There are well over twice the number of people in NYC!&lt;p&gt;All in all, numbers that describe the natural world aren&amp;#x27;t all that impressive compared to the human world.</text></item><item><author>latch</author><text>I read Dragon&amp;#x27;s Egg recently, and one of the key leap from barbarian to civilization that the neutron star aliens make is (simplistically) to count past &amp;quot;many&amp;quot; and think of quantities &amp;#x2F; numbers abstractly.&lt;p&gt;Our ability to track distinct objects is impressive by our own standard, and we&amp;#x27;re pretty good at understanding &amp;quot;big&amp;quot; numbers, say somewhere between a million and a billion. But in the scale of things, we&amp;#x27;re much closer to the hunter knowing his kill will feed his tribe for many moons versus being a starfaring race.</text></item><item><author>dwaltrip</author><text>Each &amp;quot;star&amp;quot; in the Hubble Deep Field image is actually an entire galaxy... The vastness of the universe is difficult to comprehend.</text></item><item><author>nikanj</author><text>Contrast this with the Hubble Deep Field image, which is an extremely tiny patch of the night sky. It’s sizeis equivalent to a tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres, or ~110 yards.&lt;p&gt;And my god, it’s full of stars. There’s endless detail in the universe, whether you zoom in, or zoom out.&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&amp;#x2F;wikipedia&amp;#x2F;commons&amp;#x2F;6&amp;#x2F;69&amp;#x2F;NASA-HS201427a-HubbleUltraDeepField2014-20140603.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&amp;#x2F;wikipedia&amp;#x2F;commons&amp;#x2F;6&amp;#x2F;69&amp;#x2F;NASA-HS2...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tim333</author><text>&amp;gt;The entire universe probably contains around 10^80 protons&lt;p&gt;The entire visible universe that is. It could well be infinite and hence contain a larger number of them.</text></comment>