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
Counting things seems to involve large numbers, but moving around the order of things counterintuitively involves much larger numbers.
For example, I can count six things pretty quickly, but I can arrange those six things 720 different ways.
If I double the six things to 12, I can arrange them nearly half a billion ways.
As you get more things, the counting goes up in a linear way. But the sorting goes up way, way faster. Resulting in a situation where 52 things can be arranged in more ways than all the atoms in the Earth can be counted.
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