0.0000006

The sixth day of documenting the thoughts of my calculator, and number number six is itself a six, preceded by six zeros. And another zero. Ok so thats seven zeros really, but there is a decimal point after the first one.

I was twisting the facts to fit a pattern there, something that numbers inspire in all of us. Our brains seem pre-programmed to read meaning into randomness, and thats probably a subject I will come back to another time. Or several other times if I start running out of things to say in this blog, which is quite likely I guess - numbers may be infinite but my attention span certainly isn't.

Talking of infinite numbers, thats a pretty small one on my calculator screen this morning. I used to imagine that you could keep adding zeros behind the decimal point into eternity, continually zooming into the microscopic like some kind of fractal, but as I understand it there may be limits to how low you can go. In reality I mean - on paper you could keep writing zeros until the universe fades away, but in the real world we seem to have reached a brick wall in terms of how small you can divide things.

In the laboratory that limit would be defined by the size of the stuff that atoms are made of. A helium atom is about 10^-10 metres wide, and one of the quarks that make up the atom would be a hundred millionth of that size. I can't be bothered to type all the zeros of that number, but it is definitely a lot smaller than my calculator's dream last night.

So what would 0.0000006 represent in terms of size? A quick search on the internet reveals that the wavelength of visible light is about 0.0000006 metres. And funnily enough visible light is exactly what my solar-powered calculator eats to survive, so there you have it - dreaming about food. Poor thing was just feeling hungry.