The Limit on the Gravity Plays a Huge Role in Gravitational Physics

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The limit on the gravity plays a hugely important role in this. And gravity also pushes us in the direction that you really put a lot of emphasis on in the book, which is the holographic idea. The way we get these countings of how many things can happen in a region is not by separately adding up what can happen at each location,. There's some global constraints there that make the world have less possibilities than you might have guessed.

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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