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by anvandare 2447 days ago
Correct.

>"... each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color."

>"The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number."

25 ^ ( 410 * 40 * 80 ) = 25^1312000 ≈ 10^1834097 possible books.

There are an estimated 10^80 atoms in the known universe.

1 comments

It's always staggering to really meditate on the unimaginably vast size of the universe, and then come up with some simple idea such as every combination of letters arranged in books, and realize that our universe could never fit all the books that would require, even if stacked side-by-side between all the galaxies.

(The observable universe is also on the order of 10^80 meters cubed.)