Science

There are more ways to arrange a deck of cards than atoms on Earth

The number of possible arrangements of a standard 52-card deck is 52 factorial (52!) — approximately 8 × 10^67. The number of atoms on Earth is estimated at roughly 10^50. This means that if every atom on Earth represented one shuffle performed every second since the Big Bang, you still wouldn't come close to exhausting all possible arrangements. Every time a deck is genuinely shuffled, it almost certainly produces an ordering that has never existed before in the history of card games.

Source: Devlin, The Unfinished Game (2008)

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