How can there be more ways to arrange a deck of cards than there are atoms on earth?

Question

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

Answer 1

52!. That is 52*51*50…2*1. So you want to arrange them in a row. You first draw, you have 52 possible cards. On your second draw, you have 51 possible cards to draw. This continues for a total of 52 times, each time with consecutively fewer cards. It’s just a big number that happens to be bigger than the number of atoms in the universe.