[FOM] Feasible and Utterable Numbers

[Ritwik Bhattacharya]

V.Sazonov at csc.liv.ac.uk wrote:
> I presume that we are here in the context of mathematics and natural 
> sciences - not the sociology. So I would not rely on any subjective 
> opinions. As I remember, in a known book of Richard Feinman he asserted 
> that the number of electrons in the universe is less than a number 
> which is in fact less than 2^100. I believe that this was not a 
> subjective opinion, but a conclusion from physical experiments. Thus, 
> this number is definitely non-feasible (in our current world) in the 
> sense that no physical computer could calculate its value in the form 
> SSSS...0 (a term a bigger size than our World!).
Why do you say that? The fact that the number of electrons in the 
universe is less than a number only means that there is no way to 
represent that number "at once". But imagine a TM that spits out a digit 
at a time, and then overwrites the location. Surely you need a much 
smaller number of electrons to thus represent any number, including a 
number larger than the number of electrons.

Ritwik