The Cosmological Constant in Plank Unit

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The observed vacuum energy is a factor of 10 to the minus 120 of the theoretical expectation, the amount that you calculate. So it's a huge mismatch between what your calculation saying you should get and what we actually see. Do you know about Shannon's number? Have you ever heard of that one? Yeah. Well, I actually discovered it while sort of puttering around doing research for this podcast. Claude Shannon of Shannon Information Theory fame asked how many different games of chess there would be. He was not able to calculate it, but he gave a lower limit and it turns out to be 10 to the 120. Which is coincidentally the Cosmological Constant in Plank Unit. Maybe chess

It’s a big universe we live in, so it comes as no surprise that big numbers are needed to describe it. There are roughly 10^22 stars in the observable universe, and about 10^88 particles altogether. But these numbers are nothing compared to some of the truly ginormous quantities that mathematicians have found to talk about, with inscrutable names like Graham’s Number and TREE(3). Could such immense numbers have any meaningful relationship with the physical world? In his recent book Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, theoretical physicist Antonio Padilla explores both our actual universe and the abstract world of immense numbers, and finds surprising connections between them.

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Antonio (Tony) Padilla received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Durham. He is currently a Royal Society Research Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham. He is a frequent contributor to the YouTube series Sixty Symbols and Numberphile.

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