The Universe Is Big, Right?

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The universe is big, and it's the thing you alluded to earlier. It's quantum mechanics at the end of the day. And this can keep happening, you just get this inflaton doing its little dance, and then creating gargantuan universes every so often. If that keeps going and keeps going and kept going, you could imagine a universe this large,. But yeah, we don't know that the universe is that big, but we don't knows that it is entirely.

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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