52 Factorial

It Starts with a Simple Deck of Playing

Cards
They seem harmless enough, 52 thin slices of laminated
cardboard with colorful designs printed on their sides.
Yet, as another illustration of the mantra that
complexity begins from the most simple systems, the
number of variations that these 52 cards can produce is
virtually endless. The richness of most playing card
games owes itself to this fact.

Permute this!

The number of possible permutations of 52 cards is 52!.

I think the exclamation mark was chosen as the symbol
for the factorial operator to highlight the fact that this
function produces surprisingly large numbers in a very
short time. If you have an old school pocket calculator,
the kind that maxes out at 99,999,999, an attempt to
calculate the factorial of any number greater than 11
results only in the none too helpful value of "Error". So
if 12! will break a typical calculator, how large is 52!?

52! is the number of different ways you can arrange a

single deck of cards. You can visualize this by
constructing a randomly generated shuffle of the deck.
Start with all the cards in one pile. Randomly select
one of the 52 cards to be in position 1. Next, randomly
select one of the remaining 51 cards for position 2,
then one of the remaining 50 for position 3, and so on.
Hence, the total number of ways you could arrange the
cards is 52 * 51 * 50 * ... * 3 * 2 * 1, or 52!. Here's what
that looks like:

80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000

This number is beyond astronomically large. I say

beyond astronomically large because most numbers
that we already consider to be astronomically large are
mere infinitesmal fractions of this number. So, just how
large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains
around the magnitude of this number with a fun little
theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down
the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see
how much fun we can have before the timer counts
down all the way.

Shall we play a game?

Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator.
You're going to walk around the world along the
equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step
every billion years. Make sure
to pack a deck of playing
cards, so you can get in a few The equatorial
trillion hands of solitaire circumference
between steps. After you of the Earth is
complete your round the world 40,075,017
trip, remove one drop of meters.
water from the Pacific Ocean.
Now do the same thing again:
walk around the world at one billion years per step,
removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean
each time you circle the globe. Continue until the
ocean is empty. When it is,
take one sheet of paper and
The Pacific place it flat on the ground.
Ocean contains Now, fill the ocean back up
707.6 million and start the entire process all
cubic over again, adding a sheet of
kilometers of paper to the stack each time
water. youve emptied the ocean.

Do this until the stack of paper

reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the
timer, you will see that the three leftmost digits
havent even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more
seconds to go. So, take the
stack of papers down and do it
all over again. One thousand 1 Astronomical
times more. Unfortunately, Unit, the
that still wont do it. There distance from
are still more than 5.385e67 the Earth to the
seconds remaining. Youre just Sun, is defined
about a third of the way done. as
149,597,870.691
kilometers.
And you thought Sunday
afternoons were boring

To pass the remaining time, start shuffling your deck of

cards. Every billion years deal yourself a 5card poker
hand. Each time you get a royal flush, buy yourself a
lottery ticket. If that ticket
wins the jackpot, throw a
A royal flush grain of sand into the Grand
occurs in one Canyon. Keep going and when
out of every youve filled up the canyon
649,740 hands. with sand, remove one ounce
of rock from Mt. Everest. Now
empty the canyon and start all
over again. When youve levelled Mt. Everest, look at
the timer, you still have 5.364e67 seconds remaining.
You barely made a dent. If you were to repeat this 255
times, you would still be looking at 3.024e64 seconds.
The timer would finally reach
zero sometime during your
256th attempt. Exercise for Mt. Everest
the reader: at what point weighs about
exactly would the timer reach 357 trillion
zero? pounds.

Back here on the ranch

Of course, in reality none of this could ever happen.

Sorry to break it to you. The truth is, the Pacific Ocean
will boil off as the Sun becomes a red giant before you
could even take your fifth step in your first trek around
the world. Somewhat more of an obstacle, however, is
the fact that all the stars in the universe will eventually
burn out leaving space a dark, everexpanding void
inhabited by a few scattered elementary particles
drifting a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero.
The exact details are still a bit fuzzy, but according to
some reckonings of The Reckoning, all this could
happen before you would've had a chance to reduce the
vast Pacific by the amount of a few backyard swimming
pools.

The Details
Please be advised that rounding and measurement error
combined are many orders of magnitude greater than
the current age of the universe, 4.323e17 seconds.

52! is approximately 8.0658e67. For an exact

representation, view a factorial table or try a
"newschool" calculator, one that understands
long integers.

A billion years currently equals 3.155692608e16

seconds; however, the addition of leap seconds
due to the deceleration of Earth's orbit introduces
some variation.

The equatorial circumference of the Earth is

40,075,017 meters, according to WGS84.

One trip around the globe will require a bit more

than 1.264e24 seconds, assuming 1 meter per
step, which is actually quite a stretch for most
people. This is almost 3 million times the current
age of the universe, and we still have 2 levels of
recursion to go (ocean, stack of papers).

There are 20 drops of water per milliliter, and the

Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic
kilometers of water, which equals about
1.4152e25 drops.

1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth

to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691
kilometers.

A royal flush occurs in one out of every 649,740

hands.

The odds of winning a lotto jackpot after

matching 6 numbers chosen without replacement
from the range 1 to 59 are 1 in 45,057,474.

The Grand Canyon has an estimated volume of 40

billion cubic meters. 1 grain of sand occupies
approximately 1 cubic milimeter. Thus, the Grand
Canyon could hold roughly 4e19 grains of sand.

This article estimates that Mt. Everest weighs

about 357 trillion pounds.

Here you can read all about The End.