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:
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes.... It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.”
—Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)
“The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)