Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
How Big is a Google?
A googol is 10 to the 10th power or a 1 followed by 100 zeros.
(This post is for Cameron... he's 8 :)
Problem 1. How much money would it take to fill up our classroom with $1 bills? A stack of 250 bills is about 1 inch high. You will need to find the volume of a $1 bill along with estimating the size of the classroom.
Problem 2. How many tennis balls would it take to fill the earth, if the earth were a hollow ball? The radius of a tennis ball is about 1.2 inches and the radius of the earth is about 4000 miles. The volume of a sphere, such as the earth or a tennis ball, is given by formula
V = 4/3 × pi × r3,
where r is the radius. You may use 3.14 as an approximation for pi.
Problem 3. A stack of 15 quarters is approximately 1 inch high. How much money would it take to form a stack of quarters that would extend from the earth to the sun? The sun is about 93 million miles from the earth.
Problem 4. How much money would it take to form a stack of $1 bills that would extend to Proxima Centari? This is the nearest star to the sun, and is about 25 trillion miles from the earth.
Problem 5. The most distant object known is about 10 million light years from earth. How much money would it take to form a stack of $100 bills that would extend to this object?
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