Albert Einstein and his extraordinary Theory of Relativity has been proven correct through advances in experimental physics. Originally proposed in 1916 when Einstein merged his two theories: Special Theory and the General Theory into a Unified Theory, it took experimental physicists nearly 100 years to design and build experiments to test the Theory. There is an amazing article on the 10 things Einstein got right (10Amazing Discoveries) which highlights the breadth of the very largest and smallest things Einstein thought about. Some are: the gravity-bending of starlight, the existence of gravitational waves, and the concept of black holes. The really big things. His Theory of Relativity provided the foundation for GPS technology, lasers, and an understanding of the atomic bomb's underlying principles. Additionally, he was right about the nature of quantum physics (the study of the smallest things in the universe), including the photoelectric effect and wave-particle duality, and the motion of atoms through Brownian motion. Amazingly, Albert Einstein did not win a Nobel Prize for his work on relativity, but on his discovery of the photoelectric effect law in 1922. But none of his discoveries would have been possible without mathematics and his understanding of numbers - after all it comes down to e=mc2.
This equation can be expressed in words as: a little bit of mass (m) multiplied with a super big number - the speed of light (c) squared (c2 ) which is 8.98755179 × 1016 or 8.98 multiplied by 10 multiplied by itself 16 times equals an immense amount of energy (e). It's what makes weapons of mass destruction, well, so destructive.
I borrowed Einstein's gravitational waves to use as the propulsion method for faster-than-light speed travel in the Terran intragalactic ships in my Nexus Series. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime produced by collisions of epic proportion - colliding neutron stars and merging black holes. As an outgrowth of his Theory of Special Relativity, Einstein hypothesized that these cataclysmic events would be strong enough to disturb spacetime fabric and radiate outward from the point of collision and move across the universe - like the concentric ripples traveling out from a pebble dropped into a still lake.
Einstein's theoretical gravitational waves were finally discovered in 2015 at the LIGO Observatories in Washington State and Louisiana. This year is the 10th anniversary of that discovery, astronomers from the three current gravitational wave observatories (LIGO in the US, VIRGO in Italy and KARGA in Japan) will celebrate this amazing discovery and hail Einstein's genius. At each site, antennae 'listen' for minute changes in the gravity field of the Earth as the waves pass by our planet. Two separate antennae are required to triangulate the origin point for the waves and thus determine what event is responsible for disrupting spacetime. But, this year's celebrations are dimmed by the spending cuts being made by the current US administration. Halving the LIGO budget will force the closure of one of the two US antenna sites - thus preventing astronomers from determining the origin point of wave events.
How big is big? That's the question Busy Beavers are trying to answer in a theoretical computer science challenge. Before we talk about the challenge, think about this - you are given these five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107 and, wait for it, 47,176,870. Got it? What is the next number in this series? It would have to be big! Like, really big.
These are the first 5 beavers in the Busy Beaver challenge. In 1936, computer genius Alan Turing (yes, the enigma code breaker of WWII) ask a simple question - 'Given a computer program running on a machine, can you predict whether the program will eventually stop or will it run forever?' This is the basis for the Busy Beaver challenge-answering this question. In 2007, a mathematician at Lawrence Livermore National Lab discovered the number of steps a program would execute before it stopped was a number with 3,000 digits. Okay, that's a big number but not that big, in 12-font type you could write this number down on a single sheet of paper. In May 2022, a new program ran for an even larger number of steps - before we tell you how big this beaver is, we first we need to review some simple math.
There is arithmetic addition - 10+10=20.
There is multiplication - 10x10=100.
There is exponentiation - 1010=10 billion or 10 multiplied by itself 10 time or 10 raised to the 10th power. (that's a big number)
Then, there is tetration (notated by two up arrows ↑↑). eg. 10↑↑1
Tetration is the process of exponentiation applied over and over. And, its where numbers get big, really fast. 10↑↑1=10, 10↑↑2=10 billion, 10↑↑3=10 raised to the billionth power (a 1 followed by a billion zeros). To write this humongous number down would require a stack of paper 1000 feet high. At 10↑↑4 we cross a mathematical boundary where there is no longer enough paper. This number is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. The largest beaver, the number of program steps before the computer stopped running, was announced in June of this year at 10↑↑7. This is 10 raised to a power of 10 in a multiple of exponentiation which would stretch for 25miles. The beaver winner lasted 1 week before a new beaver was announced at 2↑↑↑5. This tetration result in a number we cannot write anymore. Who said math isn't fun? Even if it twists your brain a little. (It's Really BIG)
945 TeraWatt-Hours (TWhs) of electricity. For scale it's important to know how big a quantity of something is. In this example we are measuring an amount of electricity: a terawatt is a trillion watts of electricity. A kilowatt is a thousand watts. An average household in the US uses 10,690 KiloWatt Hours of electricity annually. In 2024, data centers, built to power supercomputers for AI computations, used approximately 1.5% of the world's total annual electricity (415TWh). The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates by 2030, these data centers will annually consume 945 TeraWatt Hours of electricity - the equivalent of the entire country of Japan's annual electricity usage. Though the IEA's estimate is a rough one - it will be dependent on the growth of AI use and the ability of countries to build/expand their utility infrastructures to support these data centers.(More Than a Lightbulb)
76 Times More Global Warming. The lower income threshold for 10% of the wealthiest people in the world is $42,980 (€42,432) per year. These individuals contribute 6.5 times more to global warming than all of the remaining global population. But, hold on! The richest 0.1% (those with annual incomes over $605,720 (€537,770)) contribute 76 times more. (Its Not Fair)
515 Miles (829km). The distance traveled by the world's longest lightning bolt. In October 2017, during a major thunderstorm (often called a meso-cyclone) a bolt of lightning generated in central Texas arced all the way to eastern Kansas. A distance of 515 miles. These super long bolts are called megaflashs. Lightning is produced when turbulence in storm clouds cause particles to rub together creating a charge (think the zap of static electricity you feel in the dry of winter or which accumulates on clothing). As the charge builds up in violent updraft mega-cyclone storms - it has to go somewhere. Somewhere is a lightning discharge of millions of volts - either across the sky in cloud-to-cloud bolts or in cloud-to-ground strikes. The Texas megaflash was cloud-to-cloud. Most lightning bolts are vertical and about 10 miles (16km) in length. Anything greater than 62 miles (100km) long is considered a megaflash.
Have you seen a lightning tracker map either on your local weather channel or app? These maps, which show lightening strikes within a storm body, are recorded by the Geostationary Lightning Mappers (GLMs) programs. GLMs are maps produced by a group of satellites in geosynchronous orbit above the Earth: NOAA's GOES-16 and GOES-17 are equipped with the GLMs mappers. These satellites also recorded the longest-lasting bolt - 17.102 seconds. This bolt was created in a storm over Uruguay and Argentina in 2022. (You're Not In Kansas Anymore)
2531 Earthquakes in 55 Days and still more. That's 420 magnitude 4 or greater foreshocks with the largest being 7.4, the primary earthquake of 8.8 magnitude on 30 July 2025 and then 2,109 aftershocks with the largest being 7.4 on 13 September 2025. Each day this offshore region of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia is still rolling with earthquakes (see map below). The 8.8 megathrust earthquake is the 6th largest ever recorded after the 9.2 magnitude 2011 Tōhoku earthquake in Japan, and tied with the Equador-Chile in 1906 and the 2010 Chilean quake. These massive, highly destructive earthquakes occur at extreme depths within subduction zones (places where one tectonic plate moves beneath another and dives into the underlying mantle). The Kamchatka quake occurred at a depth of 35km beneath the ocean floor, creating a rupture 70km long by 35km wide with total slip (amount of rock movement) of approximately 725 km (450 mi) by 180 km (110 mi) within a portion of the Kuril–Kamchatka Trench up to a depth of 58 km (36 mi). In this subduction zone, the Pacific oceanic plate is sliding beneath a small crustal plate - the Okhotsk plate (a minor plate on the massive North American plate). The two plates are moving together at a rate of 80mm/year (3.14 inches/year). The quake caused physical damage in the onshore peninsula and the resulting 19m (62') high tsunami wave indirectly killed 1 person, injuring 21 during coastal flood evacuations in Japan. The earthquake occurred within the Pacific 'Ring of Fire' region which has been quiescent since the 2011 Tōhoku quake but is now increasing in activity. More mega-earthquakes are to come.
Earthquake magnitudes are measured on various scales: Richter scale of magnitude, visual amount of surface destruction, total energy released, fault moment and a bunch of others. When reported, we typical learn the magnitude of the earthquake using the modified Richter scale. Named for Charles Richter and proposed in a landmark scientific paper in 1935, this scale is based on the logarithm of the amplitude of the total displacement of the needle (how far the needle moves up or down) on the seismogram (the instrument which measures the energy wave moving through the Earth released when the rocks breaks along the fault line). So, in simple terms a magnitude 4 earthquake is 10 times greater than a magnitude 3 event and releases 32 times more energy. This factor of 10 increase by change in Richter number is what defines a logarithmic scale. So, the 8.8 Russian earthquake on 30 July 2025 is 10,000 greater in magnitude and releases 1,073,741,824 times more energy than a 4.8 magnitude event (8.8-4.8=4, or 10x10x10x10=10,000 increase in magnitude). Again, here is another example where numbers can get big fast when an event increases in size.
