As you all probably know, a googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros. Googolplex is 1 followed by googol zeros. My question is simply this: where in the universe do you find something that numbers googolplex? As I understand it, even the total number of atoms in the universe is under a googol. Where do you find a googolplex number of things? Give at least one example please.
Thank you in advance to all who reply 
it is found in mathematics only, I think. there aren’t that many fundamental particles in the universe according to the most popular models
Apparently the biggest number ever proposed as part of something that is useful is Graham’s number .
It’s the lowest known upper bound of something really freaky, and can’t be expressed using our normal 10^power notation even if we assigned all the particles in the universe to it. Still there is hope for us mortals because the lower bound is 6, or possibly 11. Now that’s a margin of error! 
Combinations can easily reach over 10[super]100[/super]. 70! (706968*…32*1) is just over it, and factorials are how you calculate combinations and permutations. For example, if you combine two decks of cards and regard each card as distinct, there are 104!/(n!*104-n)! ways you could choose n cards.
The number of universes that are expected to obey the various rules of string theory is estimated to be far larger than a googol: 10[sup]500[/sup].
http://www.aip.org/pnu/2006/split/781-2.html
Combinations and permutations of a large number of items can easily exceed a googol.
But no physical thing, not even the number of zeroes to fill up the universe at 1000 to the cubic inch, is even a googol. A googolplex is not remotely imaginable or expressible. There can’t be any examples.
Not to be confused with the Googleplex.
Sure theres an application for the googleplex. Assume there are 10^80 particles in the universe and 10^20 seconds in the age of the universe. If we treat each particle as a 10 sided die and roll it once per second, the chances of it coming up 1 every time is 10^10^20. The chances of every die coming up 1 every second is 1 in (10^10^20)^(10^80) which is 10^(10^20*10^80) which is 10^10^100. So on average, for every googleplex galaxies, you will have one in which every particle comes up as all 1 every second of it’s existance.
If we assume that there are 10^60 plank time units in the age of the galaxy, and we can roll it every plank time, then theres a 1 in 10^10^140 chance. Given that this is roughly what a particle does at every plank time unit (although I’m not sure how many discrete “decisions” each particle has per plank time unit), this can be thought of as the probability of a random universe existing. In other words, there are about 10^10^140 potential universes, give or take a few orders of orders of magnitude.
Another meaningful instance of a googleplex can be in the measuring of statistical distributions. I’m not quite certain but I think the number of standard deviations from the norm required to get a probability of 1/(1 googleplex) is a reasonable number. Thus, if we assumed that the quantum probability curve of a particle is normal, then the probability of it being on the other side of the universe should be somewhere around the vicinity of a 1 googleplexth. If anybody is willing to solve for the cdf of the normal curve to get an analytical answer would be much appreciated.
Ok, so I’ve played around with some statistical packages and it seems like the the chances of something exceeding roughly 10^50 standard deviations from the norm is about one googleplexth. Given one meter is 10^35 planck lengths and 1 light year is 10^15 meters, this means that if you had a normal probability distribution for a particle with mean at one spot and a standard deviation of 1 planck length, the chances of it being 1 light year away is 1 googleplexth.
I don’t think anything in the real world follows the normal distribution that far before getting quantized but it works as a theoretical construct.
All the remarks relating to the “universe” should have said “observable universe”, as (in my understanding anyway) the universe is infinite and it is only its extent that is observable from a single location that is finite.
I think University of Pennsylvania physicist Max Tegmark has demonstrated that the average distance from here to the closest “Hubble volume” (observable universe centered on another point in which every observable detail would have to match because packing the space with protons in random quantum states would have reproduced our pattern by then is 10^10^118 m. That is not very different from a “googleplex” (as these things go, eh?)
Anybody more familiar with Tegmark’s work please correct me - this is from memory.
Well, the Universe might be infinite, and that’s the standard default assumption given the curvature (or rather, lack thereof) we observe, but if so, it’s unprovable. So I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, but I wouldn’t say you’re right, either.
i find it very hard to believe there are less than a googol atoms in the known universe considering our planet alone is made up of approximately 1.33*10^50 atoms…so our earth alone is made up of about half a googol of atoms…so how can the entire universe be made up of less than a googol atoms please explain to me? lol
1.3310^50 is not half a googol. Half a googol is 510^99.
Well, your “half a googol of atoms” is off by 10^49
Half a googol of atoms would be .510^100 or 510^99 if you want.
If we round off your estimate to 10^50, there would have to be as many Earth sized bits of matter in the universe as there are atoms in all of the planet, which doesn’t sound impossible, but estimates currently run at … is it about 10 thousand billions? less than that. Or is that the estimated number of protons? Well it’s mostly hydrogen out there anyway, so same difference.
That’s not half a googol, googol is 10^50 times greater than 10^50
The volume of the Universe of the observable Universe is over 10^59 times greater than the volume of the Earth, so if the observable Universe was as atomically dense as the Earth, the number of atoms in the Universe would be greater than 10^109 which is several orders of magnitude over googol. However the Earth is over 10^29 times more atomically dense than the average atomic density of the observable Universe which means the total number of atoms in the observable Universe is only around a paltry 10^80.
If it’s any comfort, I have actually encountered a googol in a real physical calculation, that I was doing for real reasons (i.e., not just to try to get a big number). The largest black holes expected to exist would last for something like 10^103 seconds before evaporating fully.
The number of possible distinct legal Go games is in the ballpark of a googolplex. However this figure is inflated since most of the “legal” games are long blundering sequences of sacrifice and resacrifice that each take many octillions of centuries to play out, even at very high speeds.
Wait, I thought that in Go, a stone once placed on a spot remained there for the rest of the game, and that no other stone could be played on that spot. How, then, could a game last for more than 361 moves?
Nothing compared to Rayo’s Number!
Stones that are surrounded are taken off the board and those spots could be played on again. In practice a piece being played where a stone used to be only happens in a small subset of situations such as ko fights.