From Paul Whiteley, Bittaford, Devon, UK
Visualising 1 × 1090 as the number of particles in the universe was seen as a sort of upper limit for all practical purposes for numbers(9 August, p 28). Why bother with infinity?
I think we are capable of visualising much bigger numbers, but do they have a place in reality? Imagine a 4000-by-4000-pixel monochrome screen with 256 brightness levels. Cycle through every combination of every pixel and brightness level and the result appears to be 1.37 × 10514. Most combinations would be noise, but the output would also contain every possible image of everything that exists or could exist that could be represented at this resolution.
Now imagine a civilisation that could examine every combination for meaning. Why? Because the secrets of the universe will be hidden among the images. I don’t have a problem grasping this. The information level of the universe is perhaps a more useful very big number than a measly 1 × 1090.
