Loading...Numbers like a million and a billion are often misunderstood, as they are much more than most people imagine. But, once we go up to numbers like a Googol and a Googolplex, imagination can’t possibly try to recreate the scale at which these numbers operate. In case you don’t know, a Googol is 10 to the hundredth power, or 10*10*10*10*10 one hundred times over. Basically, a 1 with 100 zeroes following it.
Now this number seems incredibly large, and it is. It easily dwarfs most of the comparisons that we often make to large numbers, such as the number of grains of sand. But, now let’s imagine a number one scale higher than a Googol, an already ginormous number. This number is a Googolplex, which is 10 raised to a Googol. Before you even think about that, that’s the number we just thought was unthinkably large, instead that number of zeros following a 1. This number, is obviously extraordinarily large, and as it is explained in this great video by Numberphile, a Googolplex is easily the biggest thing in the universe, or at least biggest concept. A great illustration of this number, as it truly is almost impossible to imagine such a large sum.