What are some of your favorite metaphors, analogies, or thought experiments which lend some meaning to figures in science/math which cannot be directly comprehended? I recently watched a popular video which called attention to a thought experiment illustrating the size of 52 factorial:
>Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe.
>Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.
>Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.
Search any string for the source.
Also, what do you think is the edge of human comprehension in this sense? At what scales do you think figures can no longer be directly understood by us, but only repeated or at best compared to more digestible bits? It seems to me that the number is very small.
You are now aware that the bad guys took away Pluto's status as a planet just to make that graphic work...
Jeremiah Morgan
>metaphors, analogies >>Veeky Forums
Alexander Baker
>Pluto >planet
>luddite
Josiah Rivera
Ever heard of Graham's number?
Daniel Martinez
It's a large value
Ayden Lee
>YOU SEE THAT FUCKING SHEET OF FUCKING TISSUE THAT IS WIPE MY ARSE WITH >THAT'S FUCKING SPACETIME? THE AND BROWN SHIT IS THE FUCKING SUN >NOW LOOK HOW IT FUCKING BEND WHEN I SMEAR IT ON YOUR STUPID FACE YOU FUCKING WANKER >DO YOU LIKE YOUR FUCKING SPACE-TIME ANALOGY, MISTER "I NEED TO VISUALISE" ? >HERE, LET ME MAKE AN ANALOGY FOR SPACE EXPANSION, NOW FUCKING IMAGINE MY PISS IS DARK ENERGY, OPEN YOUR MOUTH
I'd make a great professor i think.
Henry Wilson
>Mercury >Pluto
Angel Campbell
>Imagine you were born at the same time as our sun. Let's round it to 5 billion years ago. >Assume at that point you had an amount of money equal to the amount of particles in one mole, i.e. 6.02e23 money. >From that point on (5 billion years ago) you decide to give me 1 million of that money every second. Now, 5 billion years later, you would still have about 75% left of the starting money.
Elijah Myers
You didn't really explain how the 52! factorial part plays in. Is it 8.03e67 seconds until you're expected to repeat a hand?
Daniel Taylor
Oh, 8.0637e67 is 52!, sorry brainlet here.
Carter Morales
Sorry, it's just a timer counting to 52! seconds. I also neglected to mention that 52! is the number of different ways you can shuffle a hand of playing cards, though I'm sure many people knew that. Oh well.
Kayden Butler
What does Mercury have to do with Pluto being orbitally dominated by Neptune?
Nathaniel Gray
Actually making one for Graham's number could be an interesting challenge. It shouldn't be too long, it shouldn't have too much repetiton and it should be practical. You have to do things like visualize combinatorics or recursive functions in a directly understandable and physical way.
that's not what I mean though. Its just a step by step explanaion of the numbers definition. There is absolutely no creativity involved. I basically want an experimet where an acion is performed G64 times
Jonathan Evans
You forgot compound interest
Isaac Foster
The moon's distance from the earth changes and at certain points pluto could fit
Connor Harris
The problem is that even a g1 number of actions is already incomprehensibly huge and then you need to recursively perform those actions 64 more times.
Even the smallest scale of space or time is far too big to contain a g1 number of things to do. You need some levels of recursion just to describe g1.
Justin Flores
I'm pretty sure it's impossible. That link gives a pretty nice analogy describing how impossibly huge a googolplex is, and G64 is so many orders of magnitude larger than a googolplex that it's impossible to actually express in the physical universe how many orders of magnitude larger it is.
