The googol is a redundant number. It has no use!

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

20 September 2020

After working out the number of atoms in the solar system, it is quite evident that we can also estimate the number in the entire universe. All that is needed is a fair estimate of the number of stars and their sizes.

Luckily, most of the stars in the universe are “sun-like”; that is, they have similar size and they “burn” in the same way. Hence, they have similar atomic composition as our sun.

Now last week we noted that the sun is by far the largest object in the solar system. It is about 300 times the mass of all the planets put together. In other words, it accounts for 99.7 per cent of all the mass of the solar system.

With that knowledge, we surmised that it is not necessary to count the atoms in the planets since their number does not change the order of magnitude the final answer. Hence, we found that the number of atoms in the solar system is a figure with 57 zeroes – an octodecillion.

The stars in the universe are grouped in galaxies. Astronomers estimate that there are about 100 billion to one trillion galaxies in all. Each has a few hundred billion stars. Therefore, the total count of stars in the universe is a number with 22 or 23 zeroes.

Multiplying this by the numbers of atoms in the sun, we can get a fairly good estimate of the total count of all the atoms in the universe. To do that, we simply add the zeroes, thus, 57 + 23 = 80. That is, the answer has 80 zeroes.

This is the highest estimate of the number of atoms in the universe. So, the question arises: why would anyone ever need to know a number greater than 81 digits long? What would you be counting?

Doesn’t that mean that a googol with 101 digits (100 zeroes) is a redundant number? That may be so, but this has not stopped people from dreaming up larger numbers. The largest so far is the googolplex.

This is a number that has one googol zeroes. Now this not just mindboggling, but some might say it is completely unreal. The number cannot be written down – even if one had a machine for writing a zero on an atom, there wouldn’t be enough atoms in the entire universe to write all the zeroes of a googolplex!