Michael Johnson: 1,000,000,000,000
[Michael Johnson is an American journalist.]
Until quite recently, only the odd astronomer threw around numbers in the trillions, leaving the rest of us behind with our thousands, millions and billions. We didn’t mind. We couldn’t grasp the meaning of a trillion anyway — the dictionary defines it as the number 1 followed by 12 zeroes, or 1,000,000,000,000.
But today, we can hardly pick up a newspaper without being asked to get our mind around a trillion somethings. But after those 12 zeroes the average brain stalls.
Just a few of weeks ago the White House announced that the U.S. budget deficit hit $1.42 trillion in the last fiscal year, three times the previous record. Within 10 years, the annual deficit is projected to reach $9 trillion.
Elsewhere, Google announced that its engineers passed a milestone when they realized that they had indexed a trillion URLs, or Web pages, although not all of them are consulted in every search. Google says it’s about relevance, not volume.
Some financial analysts expect Google, Inc., to be a trillion-dollar company in market capitalization within 20 years, the first in the world.
At least that would be a fitting outcome for a big-number outfit like Google, itself an accidental misspelling of “googol” (1 followed by 100 zeroes). Googol was coined in 1940 by the late American mathematician Edward Kasner after his 9-year-old nephew blurted it out as a funny name for that huge number. The Oxford English Dictionary still calls it a “fanciful” word. The rest is history: Stanford University graduate students registered it as their company name in 1997, accidentally misspelling it as “Google,” and it stuck...
... The sudden surge of trillions has pumped life into academia, where men and women with chalk on their clothes have been trying to help us understand these vast concepts. My favorite example is from a professor who calculated that counting to one trillion, second by second, would take 32,000 years. Another figured that it would take 240,000 years to count the dollars spent on nuclear weapons since the beginning of the atomic age — $7.9 trillion...
Read entire article at NYT
Until quite recently, only the odd astronomer threw around numbers in the trillions, leaving the rest of us behind with our thousands, millions and billions. We didn’t mind. We couldn’t grasp the meaning of a trillion anyway — the dictionary defines it as the number 1 followed by 12 zeroes, or 1,000,000,000,000.
But today, we can hardly pick up a newspaper without being asked to get our mind around a trillion somethings. But after those 12 zeroes the average brain stalls.
Just a few of weeks ago the White House announced that the U.S. budget deficit hit $1.42 trillion in the last fiscal year, three times the previous record. Within 10 years, the annual deficit is projected to reach $9 trillion.
Elsewhere, Google announced that its engineers passed a milestone when they realized that they had indexed a trillion URLs, or Web pages, although not all of them are consulted in every search. Google says it’s about relevance, not volume.
Some financial analysts expect Google, Inc., to be a trillion-dollar company in market capitalization within 20 years, the first in the world.
At least that would be a fitting outcome for a big-number outfit like Google, itself an accidental misspelling of “googol” (1 followed by 100 zeroes). Googol was coined in 1940 by the late American mathematician Edward Kasner after his 9-year-old nephew blurted it out as a funny name for that huge number. The Oxford English Dictionary still calls it a “fanciful” word. The rest is history: Stanford University graduate students registered it as their company name in 1997, accidentally misspelling it as “Google,” and it stuck...
... The sudden surge of trillions has pumped life into academia, where men and women with chalk on their clothes have been trying to help us understand these vast concepts. My favorite example is from a professor who calculated that counting to one trillion, second by second, would take 32,000 years. Another figured that it would take 240,000 years to count the dollars spent on nuclear weapons since the beginning of the atomic age — $7.9 trillion...