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"Wednesday, July 23, 2003 Posted: 12:29 AM EDT (0429 GMT) ...

SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- Ever wanted to wish upon a star? Well, you have 70,000 million million million to choose from.

That's the total number of stars in the known universe, according to a study by Australian astronomers.

It's also about 10 times as many stars as grains of sand on all the world's beaches and deserts.

The figure -- 7 followed by 22 zeros or, more accurately, 70 sextillion -- was calculated by a team of stargazers based at the Australian National University."

The full story is at :
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/07/22/stars.survey/index.html#

I love the idea that "70 sextillion" is somehow more accurate than "7 followed by 22 zeros."

Grant

granthutchison wrote:I love the idea that "70 sextillion" is somehow more accurate than "7 followed by 22 zeros."

"70 sextillion" is so accurate in fact that we don't know if it's 7x10^22 or 7x10^37. But of course, for utterly ludicrous accuracy I like to write 7.0e22 . . . At least, my compiler complains less than when I feed it x = 70sextillion;

--Chris

chris wrote:

granthutchison wrote:I love the idea that "70 sextillion" is somehow more accurate than "7 followed by 22 zeros."

"70 sextillion" is so accurate in fact that we don't know if it's 7x10^22 or 7x10^37. But of course, for utterly ludicrous accuracy I like to write 7.0e22 . . . At least, my compiler complains less than when I feed it x = 70sextillion;

--Chris

Can any human being imagine the difference between 70000000000000000000000 stars and 70000000000000000000000000000000000000 stars ?!

I prefer to think there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand in earth beaches and deserts while i am doing my sand castle...

But why do i always think of life and death when i'am talking about the number of stars?

chris wrote:

granthutchison wrote:I love the idea that "70 sextillion" is somehow more accurate than "7 followed by 22 zeros."

"70 sextillion" is so accurate in fact that we don't know if it's 7x10^22 or 7x10^37. But of course, for utterly ludicrous accuracy I like to write 7.0e22 . . . At least, my compiler complains less than when I feed it x = 70sextillion;

It's all the fault of you Americans. You just have to do everything different!

At least the bi-, tri-, quadr-, quint-, sext- prefixes make sense when you consider than a UK billion is two 'millions' (1e12), a UK trillion is three 'millions' (1e18), a UK quadrillion is four 'millions' (1e24) and so on. It makes considerably less sense in the US version where each prefix adds another three zeroes rather than six zeroes... sure, they may be more practical numbers to use, but you could at least have had the decency to call them something different!!!

It's all the fault of you Americans. You just have to do everything different!

At least the bi-, tri-, quadr-, quint-, sext- prefixes make sense when you consider than a UK billion is two 'millions' (1e12), a UK trillion is three 'millions' (1e18), a UK quadrillion is four 'millions' (1e24) and so on. It makes considerably less sense in the US version where each prefix adds another three zeroes rather than six zeroes... sure, they may be more practical numbers to use, but you could at least have had the decency to call them something different !!!

No, you should blame the French! They were the ones who first decided that a billion should be 1x10^9 instead of 1x10^12. The Americans just copied them . . . And given the number of famous mathematicians that France was producing, who can disagree with siding with the French on this matter? Too bad we didn't get the metric system at the same time, though . . .

--Chris

chris wrote:No, you should blame the French! They were the ones who first decided that a billion should be 1x10^9 instead of 1x10^12. The Americans just copied them . . .

I've always called an American billion (10^9) 'un milliard', and 10^12 'un billion'. Looking in the TLF dictionary, 'un billion' can mean both (!) 10^9 and 10^12. 10^12 being the historical value (1484), the 10^9 meaning appeared only in 1721. And here it says that France reverted to the original definition (10^12) in 1948.

chris wrote:"70 sextillion" is so accurate in fact that we don't know if it's 7x10^22 or 7x10^37. But of course, for utterly ludicrous accuracy I like to write 7.0e22 .

Sure is a good thing mathematicians created their own notation, or the world would be in a worse mess than it is now with million, billion, trillion and whatever other "words" are arbitrarily assigned, and values changed, to what are supposed to be exact mathematical values <laughing>.

I'm with you Chris ... I'll take 7.0e22 over sextillion, million-billion, or whatever other silly words or phrases other folks assign to these values any day <smile>.

-Don

Christophe wrote:
I've always called an American billion (10^9) 'un milliard', and 10^12 'un billion'.

I agree, for me 10^9 is "un milliard" and 10^12 is "un billion". So blame the US!
Non mais sans blague

Its alot of stars good enough for me...

Is there any use for the word "googol" (if this is even spelled correctly)? I don't even remember from my elementary school days for sure what this signified. I think it was 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Then I seem to remember there was a googol-plex, which was 1 followed by 1 googol zeroes. It seemed at the time that the only use for this number was in juvenile discussions such as:

My dad is ten times stronger than your dad.

Oh yeah, well my dad is a googol times stronger than your dad.

Etc.

So really, why did anyone bother making up this word? Are there even a googol-plex of the smallest known particles in the largest known space (i.e., the universe)?

Actually, I just looked it up on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary at http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary, and what do you know, it was coined in 1938 by a person born in 1929, i.e., it was made up by a nine year old. When I think of all of the words I made up when I was nine, that didn't end up in the dictionary, life just seems very unfair.

Tim

Carl Sagan talks about the googol and googolplex on Cosmos, that's where I first heard it. (I always thought it was a shame that nobody ate that apple pie they made for that episode...)

I thought Sagan said that a googolplex was 10 to the (power of 10 to the power of 10) - 1 followed by 1e10 zeroes! But I sure can't think of a use for it...

A google is 10^100

a googleplex is 10^100^1000 or a 1 followed by a google zeroes...

[off topic]
Interesting bit of trivia- the guy who cheated winning 1 million on the UK version of "who wants to be a millionaire", the final (1 million) question was:

"what do you call 1 with 100 zero's after it"

the answer was a googol!
[/off topic]

Rassilon wrote:A google is 10^100

a googleplex is 10^100^1000 or a 1 followed by a google zeroes...

To be precise...it would be 10^(10^100).