Largest number on Earth

A step towards infinity...

Why large numbers?

Why should a large number be interesting? Does it have any practical value?
You might as well ask why numbers, any number, should be interesting at all.

We use numbers all the time. To count things, to order things, to measure. Science need numbers, one could argue that numbers are the language of science. And an indispensable tool for society, trade would become impossible without numbers, except on the most primitive level.

Numbers have lots of functions. But we use them both to count, and to think. Arranged as a spectrum we would find the smallest, but most popular numbers at one end. The other end would present the extreme magnitudes, only rarely used. However, rare does not autimatically imply unimportance. Likewise, many popular things makes only a small difference. If there's always a bit more, who cares to count...

Large numbers do have importance, in principle. They are part of the edge of our worldmap. If something is "countless" it becomes virtually unknown. Of course, we may speak of things in qualitative terms only, but then we can't seperate a drop from an ocean.

The largest number marks the edge of our capacity to understand the universe, as quantity. Quality is the other aspekt. But both are necessary, Compare shit with gold: A ton of shit may be sold as fertilizer, but a microgram of gold would be worthless.

Numbers count. Also, it makes a difference if something is known only to 90 people, or 90% of the population is well aware.What is distant now, may comes closer and closer. In the end nothing is truly countless. Even very distant entities may be given an exact size, a simple notation, and a name.

Here are two examples, one old but wellknown, another new and even larger:

Googol..?

Where do names come from? An example, why this search engine called Google? Why that particular name? Well, sometimes there's an answer right away: "Google" is a variant of "Googol", as a result of an idea from half a century ago..

The original question was how to make very large sizes more obvious, visible, understandable, digestible. The answer was a number that was extremely large but equally short in notation. Furthermore the number was given its own name: a googol.

How large is a Googol? A googol = 1 x 10¹⁰⁰. Written full out:

100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

A Googol is thus a fairly large number. Read more...

Eon...

I would like to suggest another number, a monstrosity even larger, the Eon.

Eon consists of 10 times 10, as a sequence of rising powers:


                  10
                 10
                10
               10
              10
             10
            10
           10
          10
E  =  10


Perhaps this notation looks cryptical?
Normally powers of a number imply only one level.
But here's an example with two levels:

2 in the power of 81 equals a number with 25 digits.
Results quickly hit the sky when powers are rising.

The number E, that I suggest, has not 3 levels but 3 times 3 levels. It is a number too long to be written. There are simply too many digits. How many?
Even that is a number too long to be written.

It is is only visible in the third degree, as shown in the notation above.
This makes it partly transcendent, perhaps a numerical phantasm.....


Mads Dam, February 2005




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