johnbl@tekig5.UUCP (John Blankenagel) (09/11/86)
In article <2431@phri.UUCP>, roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: > No, physicists don't usually think in binary, and no, I didn't mean > 10^200th. A physicist would say there are about 10^40 electrons and a > computer scientist would call that about 2^200 because it's more useful > that way. And please, no nitpicking from people claiming these numbers are > off by an order of magnitude or two. > -- > Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy > System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute > 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 I don't see any smiley faces so: Let's use water. Water has an atomic weight of about 18, weighs about 1 gram per cubic centimeter, and has 10 electrons per molecule. Avagadros number is 6.023E23. In 1 cubic meter of water there are about 1E6 grams. At 1/18 moles/gram one cubic meter of water has about 55556 moles and multiplying by Avagadro's number yields 3.3E28 molecules or 3.3E29 electrons per cubic meter of water. That means that in 1 cubic mile of water there are about 1.38E39 electrons and you only need about 7.2 cubic miles of water to get 10^40 electrons. And that is pure water. Who knows just how many electrons there are in a cubic mile of sea water. I think there are more than 7.2 cubic miles of water on this earth which is just a very small fraction of the mass of the sun which is a very small fraction of the mass of the galaxy which is a very small fraction of the universe which we know about which MAY well be just a very small fraction of all that exists if there is even any limit on that! The point is that any universe with only 10^40 electrons must exist in a Dr. Seus book (Horton Hears a Who I believe). Besides, if we need more mass, we can take all the energy produced by the sun for a year and convert it to water and have enough electrons to make lots of memory. Maybe that is what caused the ice age. Some Net.arch fanatic commandeered the sun for a century or two to get enough energy to make enough mass to make a memory bank for his Cray 3E24 or whatever. I bet he didn't use paging either :->. Probably didn't use unix!! John Blankenagel