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The next time you thoroughly shuffle a deck of cards, you’ll almost certainly have landed on a combination that’s never been created before — and may never be created again. This may sound unlikely or even impossible, given that each deck contains just 52 cards, but there are actually more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth. The exact number of possible card combinations is 8 x 10 to the 67th power, which is an 8 followed by 67 zeroes — an almost unfathomably large number. If you were to go back in time to the beginning of the universe and rearrange a deck of cards into a new permutation every second, the universe itself would come to an end before you were a billionth of a way to one of those arrangements repeating itself.
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It's a factNixon was a skilled player during his time in the U.S. Navy and did indeed use his winnings to fund his successful 1946 congressional race.
As for how many atoms there are on the planet, most estimates put the number at 1.3 x 10 to the 50th power or 130,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This is obviously a vast figure in its own right, but it’s still dwarfed by the potential groupings of a deck of cards. The good news for the math-averse among us is most of us will never have to deal with such impossibly immense figures in our day-to-day lives — or in our next poker game.
Numbers Don't Lie
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Poker player Andrei Karpov once lost his ______ in a poker game.
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Poker player Andrei Karpov once lost his wife in a poker game.
Atoms are almost entirely empty.
If you were to expand an atom to the size of a sports arena, its nucleus — by far the densest part of an atom, where most of its mass is concentrated — would be roughly the size of a pea. The rest of the atom, about 99.9% of it, would be empty space. The electrons floating around the nucleus are quite small, even compared to protons and neutrons; one proton is 1,836 times larger than a single electron.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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