Sandara Park: Wait, how many ways are there to shuffle a deck of cards?! 🤯


	October 21, 2024

Original photo by JU.STOCKER/ Shutterstock

There are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth.

The next time you thoroughly shuffle a deck of cards, you'll almost certainly have landed on a combination that's never been created before — and may never be created again. This may sound unlikely or even impossible, given that each deck contains just 52 cards, but there are actually more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth. The exact number of possible card combinations is 8 x 10 to the 67th power, which is an 8 followed by 67 zeroes — an almost unfathomably large number. If you were to go back in time to the beginning of the universe and rearrange a deck of cards into a new permutation every second, the universe itself would come to an end before you were a billionth of a way to one of those arrangements repeating itself.

As for how many atoms there are on the planet, most estimates put the number at 1.3 x 10 to the 50th power or 130,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This is obviously a vast figure in its own right, but it's still dwarfed by the potential groupings of a deck of cards. The good news for the math-averse among us is most of us will never have to deal with such impossibly immense figures in our day-to-day lives — or in our next poker game.

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		Numbers Don't Lie

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Atoms are almost entirely empty.

If you were to expand an atom to the size of a sports arena, its nucleus — by far the densest part of an atom, where most of its mass is concentrated — would be roughly the size of a pea. The rest of the atom, about 99.9% of it, would be empty space. The electrons floating around the nucleus are quite small, even compared to protons and neutrons; one proton is 1,836 times larger than a single electron.

Today's edition of Interesting Facts was written by Michael Nordine and edited by Brooke Robinson.