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from
The Kingdom of Infinite Number (I know, I know, I'm a geek
):
"According to Brian Rotman of Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, 10^96 is the largest possible number that could be reached by counting using a finite energy. The effort needed to count this high would exhaust all the energy in the universe, including the dark matter that cannot be detected. It is Rotman's notion that just as there is a non-Euclidean geometry in which no lines are parallel, such as the system in which a straight line is a great circle on a sphere, there is a non-Euclidean arithmetic in which counting does not extend to infinity."
And later on from the same book:
"According to Brian Rotman, 10^(10^98) is the largest "practical" number possible. If one designed a computer that was as large as the entire universe, a computer whose sole job is to store numbers from 1 to as high as one can go, this would be the largest storable number. Under his prescribed conditions, the universe-sized computer having stored from 1 to the number that is 1 less than 10^(10^98) would then require all the energy in the universe to store one more number."
*grumble* now you got me more interested in this too
Anyway, doing a few google searches, I found the bibliographic information on the paper where Brian Rotman first described this:
Brian Rotman (1997) The truth about counting. The Sciences November/December 1997 pp 34- 39
Stephen