Blake Stacey wrote:
> Spike Jones, esteemed creator of the lithiverse, cites the distance it
> takes light to cross a proton, one "chronon" as the smallest possible
> unit of quantized time. I beg to differ.... my brain dredged
> up the result 10^-42 seconds as Planck time, the smallest measurable
> unit of time. ...
Great news blake! That will give the Lithiumy Way another 18 orders
of magnitude. As for errors in the original post, no one hammered
me for calling 1E15 a trillion either, but I hope all who care about
such silliness got the real point: we sometimes do not appreciate
the magnitude of the numbers we toss around, such as 2^3021377-1.
I printed out the 37th Mersenne in 2 point font, taped the 6 resulting
pages together and now it is hanging on the wall in my office. Only
those with verrrry good eyes can read the numbers. Great conversation
piece, and may result in recruiting more GIMPSers.
All of GIMPS is searching the range from about 2^(2^20) to about
2^(2^24.3). It is easy to lose a sense of the enormity of these numbers
when we toss them around like this, or see our sometimes outdated
computers grinding away on them. The number your computer is
currently working on is big, my friends. Blake, thanks for catching
the error! {8-] regards, spike
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