ChristopherWhite.info

The online version of a piece by Martin Rees for the Guardian’s science course series:

“We are each made up of between 1028 and 1029 atoms. […] More than 1078 atoms lie within range of our telescope.”

So there’s only about 1.05 people in the visible universe, and bugger all else.

(In a recent post, which I’ve since misplaced, I criticised Madeleine Bunting for writing C02 rather than CO2, and took some flak myself for not being entirely accurate either, and not writing CO₂. In that case the lack of a subscript doesn’t obscure understading — not much anyway; it’s reasonably obvious we’re talking about a molecule made of one carbon atom and two oxygen. But in Rees’s article, having lost the superscript on 10²⁸ and so on makes it a complete nonsense.)

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