Fifty-two Factorial

I just spent a week at the beach with my family.  We do this every year and we always go to the same place: Fripp Island, SC.  One of the things I noticed while in Connecticut last Summer is that the sand quality up there is very different from that of the barrier islands of SC.  In particular, the sand in the northeast is especially coarse in comparison.  This brought me to take a closer look at the sand at Fripp this year and I started having math thoughts again.  

People often need to be around very small objects to start thinking about very big numbers.  I have to quote Mitch Hedberg here: "Rice is great if you're hungry and want 2000 of something."  Looking at the tiny (and I mean TINY) grains of sand brought me to attempt to estimate how many I had in my hand... and then how many were on the beach.  My mind then drifted back to something I figured out a few years ago and is worth sharing on the "Good for Poker" blog.  We may have talked about this before, but I find it to be really interesting, so it bears repeating.

Fact: The number of unique shufflings of a deck of playing cards is 52! = 52 x 51 x 50 x 49 ... 2 x 1

This number is insanely huge.  In particular, it is approximately 8 x 10^67.  This is on par with the number of hydrogen atoms in the Milky Way (which is estimated to be 4 x 10^68).  I find it fascinating that it is so difficult for us to visualize numbers that large.  The closest I can ever get is when I stand on a beach and pick up a handful of sand, zoom in and take a look at a few individual grains and then look down the beach.  And even then, I'm not even getting close to 52!.