A few years ago there was an email being sent around claiming that there were only [impossibly small number] atoms in the universe. Obviously someone had copied-and-pasted the number, which was a 10 to a power, and the C&P did not distinguish the superscript from just a series of numbers.
Does anyone remember what the erroneous number was, that was being emailed about?
10^80 atoms was common for decades, I do not know of the source but it was very wide spread even in the 1980’s
Just to be clear, I’m looking for the number that was being circulated by people who didn’t stop to think that if there were fewer than 1,100 atoms in the universe, there couldn’t be more than that many things. I’m not actually looking for the current scientific estimate of how many atoms there are.
I remember that, too, but I think it was caged as “Scientists are all idiots, look at this ridiculous thing they believe, obviously they’re wrong about the Big Bang and evolution, too”.
A quick Google search finds numerous results like this one (appears exactly as copied below):
(the paragraph that appears in has nothing to do with the universe, but it certainly seems to state that there are only about 1,000 atoms in the universe)
I don’t know where this phrase originally came from though; searching for that entire phrase gives over 300,000 results.
It looks to me that someone simply mistyped 10^80 (a 1 followed by 80 zeros) or didn’t get what that value actually meant and wrote 1080 by mistake. (And people just used it as a reference without really thinking about.)
Oh, does that mean I can stop counting?
More likely, someone copied 10[sup]80[/sup], and when they pasted it, it came out as 1080. I used Preview and C&P to paste the superscripted number into this post. (And people just used it as a reference without thinking about.)
Only 1080? Damn 113 is more than than. And 53 is more than that! And 34 is more than that. And 26 is way more than that. So, I conclude there are only about 2 dozen atoms in the whole universe.
It was a terrible joke amongst friends at a bar I used to haunt that the Shannon Number meant that if you slept with as many people as Shannon, you had to stop. This was only because we were interested in the ability of computers to play chess, but I slept with her anyway.
In this article it’s explained why a common estimate for the number of atoms in the observable universe is 10^80:
Where are ya gonna go from there? Forget about it…
1080 is a little over 10^3 which becomes 103 which is a little over 10^2 which becomes 102 which is a little over 10^2. Oops, stuck in a loop. So there are provably 102 atoms in the universe. Stockholm here I come.
God does not restrict himself to base ten (or play dice according to some famous guy).
That famous guy only said that because he wasn’t a gamer, and thought all dice had six sides. God always rolls d10s. Except for Quetzalcoatl; he rolls d20s.
The Buddha rolls a d4 & a d8. …not that he’s a god.
If a die rolls into a forest and nobody observes it…? 
It dies alone. 
Loki always rolls 1’s, but he changes the rules so 1’s are winning.
Whoa, Loki is a d2 crusader?