diffrentcolours | Big Numbers

(this is mostly a recap of a Fediverse thread so you may have read it already; the concept melted my brain so I want to preserve it)

During Thursday's Doof, Tes' cat stood on a keyboard and typed a string of 88 "4" characters, followed by "nm", into the Doof Discord. Rich said it was a lot of nanometres, and I said it was a lot of metres. Then they stuck it into Google and said it was about 2.8 miles. I think there must have been a buffer overflow there!

4e78m seems to be $BIGNUM orders of magnitude larger than the radius of the observable universe at roughly 4e26m... This makes the Universe feel a lot smaller than a number of nanometres a cat can type on a keyboard....

Take a metre ruler. Make it 10 times bigger. Do it again, and again. You only need to do it 26 times in total to get to the size of the observable Universe.

Take a metre ruler. Make it one-tenth the size. Do it again, and again. You only need to do it 20 times in total to get to the size of the smallest subatomic particles.

Less than 50 decimal orders of magnitude between the very smallest and very biggest things in reality.

In other words, we only need 50 digits of pi to construct circles the size of the Universe to the accuracy of a quark. Anything more is just showing off.