Photo by Cooper Hofmann

Numbers often give us fits, from simple transactions in daily life to the more advanced accounting of salaries, taxes, and rent. Just like words, numbers can be manipulated, although never as bad as by today’s internet-aided charlatans, fraudsters, and scam artists who want more than our money, including a US president who liestreams everything. None have been so flummoxed as New York Yankees legend Yogi Berra, who when asked if he wanted his pizza cut into four or eight slices answered “Four, I don’t think I can eat eight.”

Although a googleplex is the largest named number – 10 to the power of a google or 10^(10^100) – there are so many zeros a googleplex can’t be written out in full. If one had started writing one zero per second at the start of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, you would still be writing today and through all our tomorrows. Note, the Big Bang isn’t a point in space, but a point in time, as an already vast universe started expanding when dark energy turned into matter and light. What universe? The only stupid question is an unasked one.

A whole other question is infinity, which isn’t a number, nor is infinity plus 1 as in Buzz Lightyear’s call “To infinity and beyond.” It is tempting to ask what is beyond that supposed line between something and nothing. Same goes for dividing by zero and the singularities of quantum mechanics, fudged into an incomplete answer by Cornell and Caltech physicist Richard Feynman to explain quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the fast and small.

One might as well count clouds, another conundrum echoed in God’s rebuttal to Job after he lamented the mounting injustices in his life amid the madness of existence: “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea? Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?” We, the hopeful, are forever expecting perfection in imperfect poetry. Billie Holiday asked the same in her soulful lament about existence and love: “How deep is the ocean? / How high is the sky? / How far is the journey / From here to a star?” We are still working out life on our own star-orbiting planet, never mind the countless planets sprinkled among two trillion galaxies in the known universe with hundreds of billions of stars in each.

How old is the world? According to James Ussher, the seventeenth-century archbishop of Armagh, our tiny, third planet from the sun is a little more than 6,000 years old, created at nightfall on October 23, 4004 BC. Ussher’s idea was simple, adding up the ages of Jesus’s ancestors listed at the beginning of the Book of Matthew, where “Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren,” and so on 38 generations to Joseph, Mary, and Jesus in 4 BC (yes, we got that wrong too, due to a sixth-century Anno Domini miscalculation).

According to the radioactive matter present in uranium-containing rocks, created in the formation of the solar system, the earth is 4.5 billion years old. The uranium may have come from the accretion of heavy metals after the sun’s birth in the remnants of a supernova or the collision of neutron stars. We don’t know yet, but are still investigating. Our own existence certainly took more than a day, starting somewhere in Africa 300,000 years ago.

How many colours are there, a seemingly simple question? Isaac Newton counted six when he first........

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