Googol was displayed at the University of Brighton between the 18th – 24th June, 2004.
Googol comprises four eight foot by four foot noticeboards, several A1 printed sheets of a broken up composite image, numerous A4 sheets of paper with laser and inkjet prints of images found on the world wide web. It also contains a step ladder, stool and table, clear headed pins, a trolley filing drawer, with titled foolscap folders.
Next to the piece is the title. Whether or not this is part of the piece is another discussion, but the full text is as follows:
Googol
Daniel Eastwell
A googol is the number 10100, that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined in 1938 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner announced the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination.
The googol is of no particular significance in mathematics, nor does it have any practical uses. Kasner created it to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity, and in this role it is sometimes used in mathematics teaching. The Internet search engine, Google, was named as a play on the number googol.
A googolplex is 1 followed by a googol of zeroes, or ten raised to the power of a googol: 10googol = 1010100. A googol is greater than the number of particles in the known universe, which has been variously estimated from 1072 up to 1087. Since a googol is the number of digits in a googolplex, it would therefore not be possible to write down or store the digits of a googolplex in decimal notation, even if all the matter in the known universe were converted into paper and ink or disk drives.Wikipedia.
(The Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia that can be changed by anyone. This has lead to some obvious, and some less obvious, problems in defining ideas (if that is the goal of an encyclopedia)).
Visitors were permitted to wander through and round the objects in the piece and to look at the items in the filing trolley and on the boards. Above undefined sections of the boards were the legends Diagram
, Chart
, Plan
and Proposal
. These seemed to be either describing the images and text below or were classifications or titles for the images and text.
Similar images and text were within the filing folders, and each folder had a titled tab, for example, previous classification
and proximate configuration
, suggesting that the items on display had been arranged differently and with different elements in the past and possibly again in the future
Some further images and text were placed in a state of disarray on the table, suggesting, again, an ongoing process, as did the presence of the step ladder.
In fact, the items on display were sourced from searches for the section title words on the search engine google. This suggests that any real world attempt to define a meaning for these (or any) words is as limited as trying to discern an overall meaning for a very small set of linked images and texts. Moreover, any attempt to pin down just what concept links these texts and images, even in the very finite sets that are presented here is equally problematic, although a concept does present itself.
What's more, there's a suggestion that, even though it's possible to conceive of a very large set of items that may represent a concept (a googol/google's worth) this is nothing (a child's attempt at a very large number) compared to the possibility of an infinite number of items that could comprise the 'definition' of a concept.