Before Google, there was googol, the number 10^100, written as a 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

There are about 4 × 10^79 atoms in the universe. (Here’s a derivation of that number.) You could bump that number up a little by counting particles rather than atoms, but not by much. There’s not a googol of anything physical in the universe.

On the other hand, numbers larger than a googol routinely arise in application. When you’re counting potential things rather than physical things you can run into numbers much larger than a googol. This happens all the time in probability calculations. Inconceivably large numbers pop up in intermediate steps on the way to moderate-sized results.

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