A man called Wolfgang Nitsche has published a series of books, all containing the typed form of a number called a googolplex. To understand why this is such a big deal and got onto this post, let me show you the scale of this number.
To explain what a googolplex is, you first have to know the googol. It is 1 followed by 100 zeros, like this:
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
You may think that this is already an enormous number, but it doesn't end there. A googolplex is 10 to the power of googol. The number is so big that it is bigger than the total number of atoms in the whole observable universe! You can therefore see how many zeros a googolplex has. In fact, if you had infinite ink and paper, you would take longer than the entire universe has ever existed (the universe's age is about 13.5 billion years) to write it all down. Even if you somehow managed to do it, the total mass of all the paper (if you wrote 2500 zeros on each page) would be more than the total mass of the universe!
So how did this guy successfully write out the googolplex?
Well, it was all thanks to the power of computers and the Internet. On http://www.googolplexwrittenout.com/, Wolfgang placed links to about
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (almost a googol!)
PDF files, with each book containing a million zeros. You could actually print the files out, although you would either die or cause the Earth to run out of trees before you could successfully print all of them.
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