Time Essay: Getting Dizzy by the Numbers

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It could be that the googol's emergence marked the time when mankind's fascination with indigestible numbers slipped beyond the pale. In the same decade that the googol appeared, Sir Arthur Eddington opened his absolutely serious book, The Philosophy of Physical Science, with the sentence: "I believe there are 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,044,717,914,527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 pro tons in the universe and the same number of electrons."

Plainly, a world that feeds on such impenetrable figures suffers a peculiar compulsion that might be called googolmania The hunger is, whatever else, a marvel to behold, providing the spectacle of a species unable to solve a 13% inflation rate, yet eager to be informed by the Guinness Book of World Records that the world weighs 6,585,600,000,000,000,000,000 tons.

The human craving for numbers tells a good deal about man kind. It is both sign and cause of man's long trek from the days of one, two, three, many. It can be taken as a symptom of exuberant joy in the quantity and multiplicity of things. Still, the dizzy acceptance of those truly incomprehensible figures might also be construed as a vicarious variation of the old Faustian game: the yearning to know the unknowable.

So far, the game has not cost the species its unquantifiable soul. Enough of that remains to nurture widespread excitement over, let us say, a World Series. A googol may not tell us much about where we stand today, but even Edward Kasner would have appreciated the true human relevance of 4-3 Pirates