I am trying to imagine a million
Not just the number a million
But a million objects grouped or stacked together
How would they look?
How much space would they occupy?
Is the notion of a million something that can be imagined?
Or is it too vast to visualise?
I think of a mass of objects of identical size
Let these objects be cubes that can be neatly stacked
One upon the other without gaps
What if these object were sugar cubes
Each measuring one centimetre square
I could arrange a line of such cubes
One meter long
That would comprise one hundred cubes
Easy to envisage
Now I arrange another ninety- nine such lines
Above my first to form a meter square
Comprising one hundred times one hundred cubes
This makes ten thousand cubes
A very large number but easy to visualise
And now I add another ninety-nine such square meters
Above the first to form a cubic meter
I can imagine a cubic meter as topsoil or sand
Is often delivered in bags of a cubic meter
To calculate the number of cubes in my cubic meter
I remember I have to multiply the height by the width by height
That’s one hundred, times one hundred times one hundred
That’s a million!
So now I can envisage this vast number
As a tangible mass of objects
I am now intrigued to know if I can imagine
As tangible objects, a far vaster number
How about a billion?
Which is one thousand times one million
So I imagine a line of one thousand objects
Each measuring one cubic millimetre
Of which there would be one thousand in a cubic centimetre
A cubic millimetre is roughly the size of a grain of sand
So still imaginable
I add to this line of one thousand cubic millimetres
Another identical nine hundred and ninety-nine rows
One above the other
I now have a square meter comprising
One million cubic millimetres
And as many as the cubic meter of cubic centimetres!
As before, I add another nine hundred and ninety-nine such square meters
One above the other to form a cubic meter
Which this time comprises
One thousand, times one thousand times one thousand cubic millimetres
Which is one billion!
And just about imaginable as a tangible arrangement
So these two vast numbers of one million and one billion
Can now be envisaged in the mind’s eye
More meaningful that a set of unrelated digits
But there is no point in these musings
They serve no useful purpose
Other than to amuse the writer
And bore the reader!