Daniel de Bruin decided to use a set of gears to visualize a googol. It’s a wonderfully mesmerizing thing to watch the gears cycle through over the course of an hour. Here’s more from Daniel de Bruin:
Today at 14:52 I will be exactly 1 billion seconds old. To celebrate I build this machine that visualizes the number googol. That’s a 1 with a hundred zeros. A number that’s bigger than the atoms in the known universe. This machine has a gear reduction of 1 to 10 a hundred times. In order to get the last gear to turn once you’ll need to spin the first one a google amount around. Or better said you’ll need more energy than the entire known universe has to do that. That boggles my mind.
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