Building Quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson
“I suppose I can live with missing decimals, missing floors to tall buildings, and floors that are named instead of numbered. A more serious problem is the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the relative magnitudes of large numbers. Counting at the rate of one number per second...to count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls.”
About This Quote
Source Speech: Interview on Big Numbers, 2014
Human minds struggle to intuitively grasp extremely large quantities, leading to misestimation.
In simple terms: Big numbers are hard to grasp.
Key Takeaway
Use analogies to understand scale.
Themes
cognition
scale
education
Mood
curious
informative
Type
educational
scientific
When to use this quote
- finance
- astronomy
- population growth
Key Concepts
psychology of magnitude
numeracy
Questions to Reflect On
- How can you better visualize large numbers?
- What tools help you compare scales?
A Different Perspective
Analogies may oversimplify complex data.
![“They [scientists of centuries past] call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.” quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/0b0/neil-degrasse-tyson-143_century_they-scientists-of-centuries-past-call-o_12921.jpg)
![“T]he church is not a place. It's not a building. It's not a preaching point. It's not a spiritual service provider. It's a people - the new covenant, blood-bought people of God. That's why Paul said, 'Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her' (Eph. 5:25). He didn't give himself up for a…” quote by Mark Dever](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/7a4/mark-dever-3175_blood_t-he-church-is-not-a-place-it-s-not-a-bu_3297.jpg)
