Value As A Mathematical Thought Experiment
The Library contains at least books. (The average large library on Earth at the present time typically contains only several million volumes, i.e. on the order of about books. The world's largest library, the Library of Congress, has books.)
Just one "authentic" volume, together with all those variants containing only a handful of misprints, would occupy so much space that they would fill the known universe. Ignoring punctuation:
- Authentic volume:
- Variants with one misprint: = 31,488,000
- Variants with exactly two misprints: = 495,746,694,144,000
- Variants with exactly three misprints: = 5,203,349,369,788,317,696,000
- Variants with exactly four misprints: = 40,960,672,578,684,980,713,193,472,000
The number of different ways in which the books could be arranged is .
Read more about this topic: The Library Of Babel
Famous quotes containing the words mathematical, thought and/or experiment:
“What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“You wish to be thought to act justly than to do so.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.”
—David Cronenberg (b. 1943)