Imagine you have a big bucket. And in that bucket you pack a bunch of soft, slightly-squishy tennis balls. For the sake of argument, we’ll say you threw in 128 of the little green spheres.
Still with me? Good. Now, imagine all the different ways you could arrange those balls within the bucket. If you think the number is near-infinite (in the non-literal sense) you’d be right. But that’s the key, it’s near infinite. With a powerful enough computer (or a lot of time), it’s conceivable you could count all possible configurations of those 128 balls.
Now, research published in the journal Physical Review E, claims to have done just that. It says 128 balls could be arranged 10^250 different ways – ten unquadragintilliard, a number bigger than our current estimate for the number of particles in the universe.
OK. So that’s cool. We found a really big number, but stick with me for a minute and let your imagination go nuts.
If you think about it, this calculation actually could open the door to some really amazing future knowledge. Presumably, with a powerful enough computer, one day we might be able to calculate all possible configurations of any granular system. Say, sand grains in a desert, or snow flakes on a mountain. If you think about it, one day, with enough raw computing power, could it be possible to predict sand dune formation? Or know, precisely, how an avalanche will move down a mountain?
(Image Credit: Creative Commons, PughPugh)
I don’t understand the application of this, but cool, we did a thing and big numbers.
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