2.1

Introduction

You've heard of billions and trillions, but the known universe is teeming with numbers far larger than this! In Chapter 2.1 we'll explore the astronomical numbers that occur in cosmology, the study of the universe and it's origins. Then we'll see how combinatorics leads to even vaster numbers!

Articles

2.1.1 - Introduction

A brief purview of the topics for Chapter 2.1

2.1.2 - A Primer on Scientific Notation

In this article we learn about the power of exponentiation, the real numbers, and how to express very large and very small numbers using scientific notation. Lastly we establish an alternative notation for scientific notation, known simply as E Notation, and learn about stacked exponents.

2.1.3 - Scales of the Macrocosm

Take a mind-blowing journey across the cosmos. With a trusty tape measure in hand, delineated in meters, we'll measure the length of various well known objects that we find in the known universe ... we'll even speculate about the size of the unknown one ...

2.1.4 - Scales of the Microcosm

Having explored the limits of the very large we now return back to our own scale and head off in the opposite direction towards the arbitrarily small ... what are the limits of our knowledge towards this extreme and what types of extremely small numbers come about as a result?

2.1.5 - Everyday Large Numbers for a Modern World

Here I go over the large numbers we hear so much about in the modern world. Because of their frequent use, the size is often under appreciated. Here I try to recapture the immensity of such numbers as a million, billion, and trillion through a number of interesting illustrations.

2.1.6 - Larger Numbers in Science

Continuing the trend begun in the previous article, I now extend the large numbers into territory usually restricted to astronomy. Numbers in science are even more staggeringly huge than those we usually read about in the papers.

2.1.7 - largest numbers theoretically possible

Here is the grand finale of our tour of large numbers which represent physical quantities. We now use all the tools of modern science to arrive at the theoretical limit of "largest number representing physical reality".

2.1.8 - Large Numbers in probability

Now we go beyond mere measurement, and consider even larger numbers that can occur when we count combinations, and the ways in which something can play out.

2.1.9 - Number Ranges

I wrap up chapter 1 with a more in depth discussion of my "Number ranges" and how this applies.

If you have read all the articles in Chapter 2.1 I hope you found it informative and entertaining. In the next chapter I will start to go over how scientists cope with large numbers. The main topics are scientific notation and the SI prefixes.