Do you ever look up at the night sky filled with hundreds of blinking stars .... and think about how far away those massive, luminous balls of plasma really are?
Do you ever start thinking about the vastness of the universe and the concept of infinity?
And then suddenly your mind aches as you battle to comprehend the enornimity of this all ... and you shake your head and need to stop that thought process - much like when your computer freezes and you need to re-boot it.
Well that happened to me today while I was reading about the magnitude of our country's debt.
It was fascinating to read how new numerical descriptions will become more familiar as deficits and borrowings increase.
Initially a big number was a Million, but not so long ago a Billion (one thousand million - 1,000,000,000) represented a large number. Now in 2008, the term Trillion (a thousand billion - one million million - 1,000,000,000,000) is finding its way into financial news.
Today, for the very first time ever I read an article referencing a Quadrillion (one thousand million million - 1,000,000,000,000,000). That's a number with 15 zeros.
My brain started to ache trying to rationalize the perspective of such a large number. At the point, I decided to simply think of anything bigger as a Zillion - the term for indefinite and fictitious numbers.
BTW: While researching these definitions I realized why "Google" uses this name - Googol is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros (to big to illustrate here). Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.
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