Mersenne Worship
A team of mathematicians at UCLA discovered the most exotic number in the history of counting. Using a network of powerful computers they discovered the largest known Mersenne prime. A Mersenne number is 2 to any power minus 1. 2 to the 189th power, for example, is just a number. But 2 to the 189th power minus 1 is a Mersenne number. I don’t understand why mathematicians find Mersenne numbers so fascinating, but they do. And among the Mersenne numbers, those that are also prime numbers are the rarest of the rare. Only 47 of them have been found so far.
The UCLA Mersenne prime number is 2 to the 43,112,609th power minus 1. Don’t forget to subtract that 1. Two to the 43,112,609th power is a painting you might find on the wall of a motel room. Two to the 43,112,609th power minus 1 is the freakin Mona Lisa.
What fascinates me most about the UCLA Mersenne prime is the size of this number. It's 12,978,189 digits long. Most people have heard of a Googol, which is a 1 with 100 zeros after it. That sounds like a big number, but perhaps you're not aware of just how big it is. If you counted all the atoms in the entire universe, you would still fall well short of a Googol. This means that we humans have invented a number which, in fact, has no connection to any known reality. There will never, ever, ever be a Googol of anything.
I really don’t know what to say about that. And if a googol is more than all the atoms in the universe, what shall we say about a number that is almost 13 million digits long?
What is this desire we have for things that are impossible and beyond us and incomprehensible and, yes, even beyond the scope of reality? In the ancient world, we stood by the flickering light of our fires, looked into the darkness, and wondered what was lurking there. Six hundred years ago we stood at the ocean shores and asked what was beyond the horizon. We gaze into our telescopes and measure space with the light year, a distance so vast and beyond our ability to understand that one wonders exactly what is in our minds when we speak of it.
And now we have given a name to a number so large that we cannot begin to consider how a person might imagine what it could mean for that number to have any kind of reality.
Seriously - why would we do that? What purpose could such a number serve? What is the fascination here? Is this compulsive need to look beyond reality the mark of God’s hand in our clay? Is this some wondrous and eccentric curiosity bequeathed to us by a higher mind? Or is this the mark of the beast, the god impulse turned toward the golden calf of our imagination?
Or maybe our passionate desire to look for what is beyond us comes from something between those extremes. A place that lies on the lurching fault line between sin and salvation. A place we might call worship.
Yes, why not call this impulse worship? Because it is the adoration and desire for something beyond us. Why not call it worship? For it is the craziest, most outlandish, unrealistic, and impractical thing you’ve ever heard of; and the most wonderful and beautiful thing you can imagine. Why not call it worship? Because when those UCLA scholars pumped their fists and shouted with joy at their discovery, it was as crazy as Moses saying, “I think I just discovered the name of God. And I heard it from a burning bush.”
Why not call it worship? Because of all the things we humans love to contemplate and consider, the ones that break open our hearts and bring tears of joy to our eyes are the ones that that lie completely beyond us. It is the far country and the distant ideas and the wistful hopes that gave birth to the old stories, which in turn give birth to us.
It’s all worship, really. If you think about it. All that crazy human stuff.
rlp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol
Special thanks to Adam Edwards for helping me with the facts on this piece.
I’m proud to announce that Turtles All The Way Down came out in November of 2009. This was my first experience with the Consafo model of social media community publishing.
2000 copies were printed. We sold well over 500 as advance purchases or in the weeks leading up to Christmas. This paid for the printing costs completely.
In the interest of
Submitted by Simon on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 09:45.In the interest of perceiving something that at first seems beyond our ken, here's something I found recently that, whenever I open the link, I can't help but stare at it and marvel. It's also a wikipedia link, and it's just a small animated GIF that accurately represents the speed of light and the time it takes to travel between the Earth and the Moon. It's the first time I've had this particular perspective on it. That's all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Speed_of_light_from_Earth_to_Moon.gif
Great Essay
Submitted by DSpitko on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 09:47.Loved this - I will contemplate on it. Somewhat similar, I have spent considerable time trying to define what is sacred. Of course, it is not just limited to what goes on inside the four walls of a church. Is not the Grand Canyon sacred?
Just a nit - "And now we given a name to a number"
Dave
Thanks! Amazing how hard it
Submitted by rlp on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 10:12.Thanks! Amazing how hard it is to proof your own stuff. I probably read over this no less than 25 times, just counting the times at the end when I was polishing. So I love having you guys spot stuff. fixed it.
Sorry rlp
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 12:12.I've got to correct your math here, because as a mathematician, this makes me itch...
2 to the 43,112,609th power is not 2 with 43,112,609 zeros.
It's 2 times 2 times 2 times... 43,112,609 times.
And besides being pretty cool and involving brain breakingly big numbers, the search for large primes is actually a pretty practical thing as far as theoretical mathematics goes. Most modern computer cryptography is based large (or at least medium sized) prime numbers.
Yeah, I slipped into a
Submitted by rlp on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 13:01.Yeah, I slipped into a writing pattern with the googol number. I actually heard from someone, realized it, and changed things. Probably about the time you left this comment.
Why
Submitted by iandunn on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 13:28.Here's some more reasons why they do it: http://mersennewiki.org/index.php/Why_participate_in_the_GIMPS_project
Ooh, great article. Thanks
Submitted by rlp on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 16:47.Ooh, great article. Thanks for the link.
Beautiful Prose
Submitted by evan on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 18:24."the lurching fault line between sin and salvation"
A beautiful piece of writing.
Up until reading this, I thought "googol" was spelt the same way as the big search engine company, even though I knew of the term before the company existed. Weird.
BTW, there is also "googolplex" which is a 1 with a googol zeros after it.
Thanks.
Evan
Yeah, I knew about the
Submitted by rlp on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 23:10.Yeah, I knew about the googolplex. But it seemed a stretch to me. They didn't work for it. I get the googol, 1 with 100 zeros. That's been around awhile. Suddenly someone says,
"Hey, what about a 1 with a GOOGOL zeros behind it? Huh?.....huh?"
Eh, the people at UCLA earned the right to have this number, you know?
So anyway, I decided mentioning the googolplex would just muck up the essay. But it is interesting.
Googolplex
Submitted by evan on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 23:16.> the people at UCLA earned the right to have this number, you know?
> I decided mentioning the googolplex would just muck up the essay.
Agreed - I was just mentioning an additional factoid, 'tis all.
My brain hurts, but in a good
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 10:10.My brain hurts, but in a good way. Great post.
P.S.
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 10:11.That's Jennifer @ GDW/Jesus, the one with the hurting brain. I'm not really anonymous.
Concerning the speed of light
Submitted by JoKeR on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 11:46.First, one way I noticed how slow the speed of light is was when I used to watch a lot of Braves baseball. When Atlanta was playing the Cubs in Atlanta I could get the game on both WTBS (which has grown into Turner's Super station) and WGN. The signal for the WTBS broadcast would go directly from the stadium to the local station and then over the airwaves to my house a few miles away. The WGN signal would have to bounce off a satellite to get to Chicago, then off a satellite again to get to my local cable company which would then send it the last few miles to my house. By putting two TVs next to each other, one tuned to the over the air broadcast and one tuned to the cable broadcast I could watch two live broadcasts of the same game but there would be about a half second delay from one to the other. With satellites in geo-synchronous orbit that puts them at about 22,000 miles from the surface of the earth. Four such trips makes 88,000 miles which is close to half of the distance light travels in one second. Thus, when watching the batter swing I could see the two images of the swing occurring in about the time it takes to say "Swing! Swing!" I always thought that was cool.
Concerning large numbers
Submitted by JoKeR on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 11:49.Concerning large numbers: I heard of an activity that allows everyone to do something that has never been done before. Choose some very large number, say 5,398,283,932,217,391 for example (this is five quadrillion and change). Say the name of that number out loud (say your own random number, this one won't accomplish the goal since I've already said it). A random number chosen from that large a number set can almost certainly be considered as never having been said out loud before (at least the odds are pretty good, who says the spelled out name of numbers that large in general?). Thus, by saying it you will have done something that likely no one else has ever done. Not a great achievement, but I found it to be an interesting thought.
Peace!
JoKeR
Oh baby, that will likely
Submitted by rlp on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 14:40.Oh baby, that will likely become an essay here. for reasons I'll describe when I finally write it. ;-)
cool.
Purpose? Use?
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 12:58.Mathematics is only about mathematics. It has no truck with purpose, or use. Those are things that concern those who are not mathematicians.
Well, understood, I guess.
Submitted by rlp on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 14:37.100 points and a cigar for using "truck" in that way. I love that.
I'm tempted to take you to task for that statement and unpack it a bit. What exactly do you mean, no truck with purpose or use? How about this: You like math. Numbers bring you great joy. So you want to play with numbers. That's a purpose. That's a use.
I think the point behind this was to say exactly what you might be saying...the best things in life cannot be reduced to easy purposes and uses because they are tied so closely to more basic things, like love and desire and joy.
Which is good. Those of us who were intimidated by numbers early and don't speak the language would like to hear you talk about your love. On the other hand, talking about it is what we writers do, I guess.
Point?
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 02/12/2010 - 07:18.I think I like your description of my point better than I like my own. Mine was simply that mathematicians do what they do simply because they love doing it. They don't worry about any practical use that might be found for their mathematics. And they don't try to tailor what they do with any practicality in mind. It's done simply for the sheer elegance of it.
Note that Isaac Newton developed the calculus so he could use it in his physics. For this he is revered, but when it comes time to actually do any calculus, mathematicians use the system developed contemporaneously by Gottfried Leibniz, who in mathematics circles is held in somewhat higher esteem than Newton. Leibniz developed his calculus because he saw that he could, with no other reason in mind.
Sweet!
Submitted by rlp on Sat, 02/13/2010 - 10:18.Sweet!
I do believe the new number
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 02/13/2010 - 14:39.I do believe the new number is sacred in the way that the Grand Canyon is sacred...
How very interesting this is!
amyjrzk