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 simple enough:
There are 52 cards in a standard deck. That means there are 52 ways to choose the first card.
After you have chosen the first card there are now 51 cards remaining. So there are 51 ways to choose the second card.
That means there are 52 times 51, or 2,652 ways to choose just the first two cards.
Proceeding through the remaining 50 cards, there are 80, 658, 175, 170, 943, 878, 571, 660, 636, 856, 403, 766, 975, 289, 505, 440, 883, 277, 824, 000, 000, 000, 000 or about 8.1 x 10^67 different ways to select 52 cards from a standard deck.
For giggles this an also be expressed as: 2^49 ×3^23 ×5^12 ×7^8 × 11^4× 13^4 ×17^3 ×19^2 ×23^2 ×29 ×31 ×37 ×41 ×43 ×47
There are about 10^50 atoms in the earth.
Counting multiples of things yields larger numbers than does count things.
Latest Answers