On 24 Apr 2014, at 01:05, LizR wrote:
On 24 April 2014 04:25, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps.
Oops. They are the same person (Twain was Clemens' pseudonym). I
thought it was common knowledge, perhaps because I read the
"Riverworld" series by Philip Jose Farmer.
Thanks Liz, and David, and Chris.
Now that you said it is common knowledge, I do have a vague feeling
that I might have knew that, perhaps in my preceding life!
Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time
of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that
many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude
that.
I think it was considered perhaps infinite, in that no one knew how
long it had gone on and there was no obvious evidence of
cosmological change - telescopes weren't good enough to even resolve
stars in galaxies outside the Milky Way, I believe - but there was
also no idea of processes lasting billions of years. Hence Twain's
"hundred million" was about the largest size anyone could grasp, so
it was in a sense akin to him saying infinity.
To be sure, Archimedes already knew technic to name big numbers, which
of course remained quite small compared to the numbers nameable
through the diagonalization technic. I think also that people can say
"billions" to mean "a lot".
I use often "ten thousand" for that effect,
Bruno
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