It’s the latest in a long, long line of mystical, magical numbers. Douglas Adams delivered “42” as the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. Thanks! And writers like Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea gave us the self-fulfilling prophecy of 23. Look for 23, find 23 everywhere, declare “Meaning Found!”
These cosmic associations go way back, at least back to when the Pythagoreans were whipping themselves into a perfect frenzy over the number 10. The best of the numbers, of course, are cosmic in both senses of the word (from Merriam-Webster):
(1) of or relating to the cosmos, the extraterrestrial vastness, or the universe in contrast to the earth alone
(2) of, relating to, or concerned with abstract spiritual or metaphysical ideas.
Scott Funkhouser, A visiting physics prof at The Citadel has given us another: 10^122.
It’s a little too big to notice on street signs or phone bills, but it’s out there, waiting, waiting, waiting. Funkhouser says that if you combine the fundamental constants of the universe in the right ways, you can’t avoid 10^122. (That’s 1 followed by 122 zeroes – an article in Nature News points out that this behemoth is more than the number of particles in the universe.)
Here’s where Funkhouser sees it (the last two are copied verbatim from the Nature article):
• Some theoretical cosmological models show that “dark energy” makes up just one part in 10^122 of the vacuum energy.
• The ratio of the mass of the observable Universe to that of the smallest possible ‘quantum’ of mass is about 6x10121. ….
• … The number of ways in which the particles of the current Universe can be arranged throughout space (a measure of entropy) is 2.5x10122.
And what he says about it (again, from Nature)
“If you take the basic parameters of the Universe there are only so many ways you can put them together to make ‘pure numbers’ with no units,” Funkhouser says — and less still ones that have any obvious physical interpretation. So the fact that even a handful of these give ratios that are so huge and yet so similar seems significant. “It is unlikely for chance alone to be responsible for generating so many pure numbers from just several fundamental parameters,” says Funkhouser.
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