Yes! you read that right. It’s not google! It’s Googol. Googol is a very large number written with 100 zeros after 1. In scientific notation it’s written as 10100. If you want to imagine how large this number is, just know that there are only about 1086 particles in the observable universe (that is excluding dark matter (if they exist)).
Googol may seem like a very large number. Yet it’s not even nearly as large as our next superstar, Googolplex. Googol is written with 1 followed by 100 zeros whereas googolplex is written with 1 followed by a googol number of zeros! Googolplex in scientific notation equals to 10^(10100). That’s a very very large number. Since googolplex is 10googol it’s obvious that there are more zeros in googolplex than the number of particles in the observable universe. Therefore even if we use all the particles in the universe as ink that won’t be enough to write down the googolplex.
There are a lot of interesting facts about the number googolplex. One such fact is that when you go googolplex meters along the space (assuming that the universe is large enough) you can find exact copies of yourself. This is because at some point, all the combinations of matter arrangements will be over and it will all start again. To be more precise, all the combinations of matter arrangements with the number of particles that we have is 10(10^(70)). That’s less than googolplex. So as you walk along within googleplex meters, you’ll find exact copies of yourself.
This might make you wonder that the largest number ever is googolplex. If you think so, you are clearly mistaken. There are more numbers that are way bigger than googolplex. Graham’s number is such a number. But that’s a topic for another article.