Large Numbers in The Everyday World
Examples of large numbers describing everyday real-world objects are:
- The number of bits on a computer hard disk (as of 2010, typically about 1013, 500-1000 GB)
- The estimated number of atoms in the observable Universe (1080)
- The number of cells in the human body (more than 1014)
- The number of neuronal connections in the human brain (estimated at 1014)
- The Avogadro constant, the number of "elementary entities" (usually atoms or molecules) in one mole; the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon-12; (approximately 6.022 × 1023 per mole)
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Famous quotes containing the words large, numbers, everyday and/or world:
“My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with its hard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it—the Bovary syndrome.”
—Angela Carter (1942–1992)
“But when did love not try to change
The world back to itself no cost,
No past, no people else at all
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)