One day while sitting on the floor of UTA's Chemistry Research Tepee (CRT)
I had a heated argument with someone over
whether or not a 100 digit number qualified as a big number. I claimed
that my friend couldn't even imagine a 100 digit
number and he claimed that I had no idea what he could and could not
imagine. I have a feeling both of those statements
are true. Continuing though, I decided to make my point with
rice.
How many grains of rice are in a standard 2 pound bag of
rice?
The guesses were as high as 10,000 grains, and as low as only 2,000
grains. I honestly said that I'd be surprised if the
number wasn't at least 50,000 grains. They decided to give me at
most 10,000 grains.
Unhappy with this number, I went home and counted. Okay. Okay. I only
counted out 300 grains and weighed that.
300 grains of rice = 6 grams
1 gram of rice = 50 grains
2 pounds of rice = 45,360 grains
So it turns out that we were all a bit off. I shot over by almost 5,000
grains, and they were under by about 35,000
grains. However, if you used significant figures I'd be right on.
:)
What is the point of this? All the grains in a bag of rice is only 5
digits long. To take it to the next level, I then
calculated the volume of this rice to be about .02604 cubic feet. So 100
digits worth of rice (10^99 minimum) would
require over 5.7 x 10^92 cubic feet or approximately 3.9 x 10^81 cubic
miles. To make that fit into your head a little
nicer, that's 1.5 x 10^70 earth volumes.
To put that in perhaps our largest form of volume, 100 digits worth of
rice would require 1.9 x 10^43 cubic light years
of space.
The units still not big enough? We have but one greater thing to measure it against. The Universe. How much of the universe would be
filled completely with rice if we had just 100 digits worth of rice?
135,714,285,714,280,000,000,000 Universes completely filled with rice.
Now to relate this to large number factoring of a 100 digit number. Imagine that in all that rice you are
searching for two grains. It makes finding a needle in a hay stack seem trivial if you really think about it.
And, my friends, is rice in magnitudes.
(c) 2005 Nic Reveles
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