About The Numbers Scale
Created by Nolan Schleiff
Scroll down to go from zero, through counts of real things, up to numbers far too big to write out. The big number in the top left is roughly where you are, as a power of ten. Each stop is shown with how many times bigger it is than the one before.
What's Simplified
- Counts of real things, like stars, ants, trees and grains of sand, are estimates, and some are only good to within a factor of ten or more.
- Numbers can't be drawn to scale, so every stop is drawn at the same size on screen. The numbers tell you how different they are.
- The last four stops are so big that the readout can't slide smoothly between them, so it jumps from one to the next.
- Zero isn't on any power-of-ten scale, since no power of ten equals zero. It's here as the starting line.
- Animations are illustrations, not simulations.
Sources
- Graham's number: Graham and Rothschild (1971), popularised by Martin Gardner in Scientific American (1977).
- Googol and googolplex: Kasner and Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination (1940).
- Largest known prime: the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), October 2024.
- Library of Babel: Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel" (1941).
- Possible chess games: Claude Shannon, "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess" (1950).
- Avogadro's number: the 2019 SI redefinition (BIPM).
- Rubik's Cube: Rokicki, Kociemba, Davidson and Dethridge (2010).
- Ants: Schultheiss et al., PNAS (2022). Trees: Crowther et al., Nature (2015).
- Cells in the body: Sender, Fuchs and Milo, PLOS Biology (2016). Neurons: Azevedo et al. (2009).
- People alive: United Nations World Population Prospects.
- Visible stars: the Yale Bright Star Catalogue.
Get Involved
Spotted a mistake or want something added? Leave a suggestion. Enjoying it? Support the project.
A text version of every stop is available for screen readers.
See the other scales on the home page.
Scale Of Everything™ · © 2026 Nolan Schleiff. All rights reserved.