Quick, what’s the biggest number you can think of? Infinity? Infinity plus one? Mathematicians struggle with this problem all the time; luckily they’ve found ways to do calculations on numbers that are too big to ever write down.
They’re not the only ones having to stretch their minds around some unfathomably big numbers. In this chapter, we’ll explore some of the most mind-boggling extremes around. Our journey begins on a scale that has no end, climbs the millimetre-high mountains on the surface of neutron stars and samples a handful of atoms so hot they exist at negative degrees kelvin. Get ready for some seriously sweaty mental gymnastics – it’s Bikram yoga for the brain.