Friday, July 12, 2013

Numberphile's Googolplex and Clones?

Hey

So Numberphile has a video that they released awhile back about googol and googolplex. I am pretty sure most of you have heard of a googol and a googolplex, and we are not talking about the search engine, they are numbers. You have a googol which is 10100, which is basically 1 followed by 100 zeros. Then there is googolplex, which is 1010100, which is basically 10 the the power of a googol. Now they say in the video that if you had a universe that was a googolplex meters across, that you would see "repetition", which means you could see a clone of yourself, because there is a limited amount of quantum states that can make up the space something takes up. And that limited amount is 101070, which is less than this universe, so in theory you would see yourself somewhere else in this universe because there is enough space to run out of different combinations of matter.

If you want to see the video here is a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GEebx72-qs



Now, there is a problem with this theory. First, the universe would have to be a little larger to be realistic because we are talking about the combination of matter, and this would only work if this universe that is googolplex meters across was more than 70% matter. And realistically the universe is just empty space. And also even if you had the entire universe filled with matter, there isn't enough space to have every combination of matter twice, so instead of you being the two times, there is only a chance of having you there. Plus, the chance of having everything different in the first  101070 meters isn't 100%, and the same with the rest of the universe.

But all in all, if you had a perfect universe, then yes you would be able to see yourself somewhere else in the
 universe.
As always

Scientifically
-Connor