I just read Moses 1 for my scripture reading today (well, by the time this gets posted, yesterday), and I was intrigued by the concept of worlds without number (Moses 1:33, 35).
Not that I have any great spiritual insight into those verses. I just found the concept intriguing.
I don’t think God is being literal; the fact that the worlds are numbered unto him indicates that it is not a truly innumerable number. I think it means a number beyond our real comprehension.
What is the limit of the numbers we can truly understand? In once sense, we can understand very large numbers; impossibly large numbers. For example, a googol is 10 to the power of 100, which means a 1 followed by 100 zeros. In fact, I’ll write it out:
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
That’s a googol. Easy enough to understand. Now, on to the googolplex, which is 10 to the power of a googol. It’s merely a 1 followed by a googol zeros. A simple concept. You understood that, right?
You understand the concept, but you do not understand the number.
If you used every particle in the entire universe to represent a zero, you still could not write out a googolplex, because there are not a googol particles. (Isn’t it amazing that we can think of something so big that the universe can’t contain it?)
So, how big a number can you really understand? I found an interesting web page about numbers that divides numbers into classes.
Class 0 numbers are those we can intuitively grasp exactly just by looking. If you see five things, you can know there are five things without having to count them. The limit on this is between about five and nine. After that, you need to start grouping and counting.
Class 1 numbers are those we can judge approximately (within an order of magnitude) by direct perception. You might not know that there were 342 people in a room, but you knew it was a lot more than 34 and a lot less than 3400. As numbers get higher, it gets harder to make that judgement, and so the limit on this is probably tens to hundreds of thousands, maybe as high as a million.
There are other classes, but those two are sufficient for this discussion. Beyond Class 1, you can no longer understand the number directly, you can only understand a representation of the number. Class 1 is the limit of what is really numberable unto man.
(Let me make it clear I’m not saying that this has anything to do with how many worlds God has created. That was just the starting point for talking about what the limits of our sense of numbers are.)