I understand the math behind it, I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that something so common and limited like a deck of cards can have more ways to be arranged than something so massive like the earth with all its oceans and mountains has atoms.
In my mind it would make more sense that even a little pond has more atoms than there are deck arrangements.
Could it be due to the fact that atoms have a lot of empty space in them?
In: 318
It’s in fact a mind trick.
The number of atoms in the galaxy/universe/whatever is a large, however finite number. There are way more numbers existing.
The thing with the card deck combination is that they don’t exist. All of those decks are just imaginary things, not real objects. Some of them do exist of course but not all.
What’s happening is that when you compare the large count of atoms to a large number of possibilities, your brain puts it into a context of counting real things. So basically your brain tries to imagine a different deck of card near to each atom, but because the deck itself is made of atoms, so it’s impossible.
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