Sometimes you see a headline and just don’t know what to do with it. Today, this came up on my internet feed: “12 billion light-years from Earth, NASA has discovered a massive reservoir of water containing 140 trillion times the water on Earth.” If you are wondering where this is, it surrounds quasar APM 08279+5525, and is neither liquid nor ice, but gaseous, even though the temperature is about -63 Celsius. In case you didn’t know, this would be a little colder than -84 Fahrenheit. The quasar surrounds a black hole that has a mass equal to 20 billion suns, and the power that it throws off is “comparable to a thousand trillion stars like our sun.” This reservoir, they say, has been there since long before the Milky War was created.

Okay, so these are big numbers, no question about that. Source? The website is paris2018.com. It looks legit, but I can’t say I know what it is.

In order to find some other big numbers, I asked Google to tell me how many galaxies there are in the universe and Google told me that there are “an estimated 2 trillion galaxies” in the observable universe. And that there are 10 to the 24th power stars. Now if you are wondering how many stars that would really be, all I can tell you is what Google tells me: “more stars than all the grains of beach sand on planet Earth”.

And then I asked how many black holes there are in the observable universe, and I was told (by Google again) that there are an estimated 40 quintillion. That is a number I can write out: 40,000,000,000,000,000,000. You want to know how 40 quintillion compares to 10 to the 24th power? I happen to know that (thanks again to you know who). A quintillion is only 10 to the 18th power (and a sextillion is 10 to the 21st power).

I know you can go up to a centillion using recognized words for the numbers and then names become more speculative. I want to tell you how many zeros there are in a centillion. I thought that would be easy. But Google stumped me: “A centillion has 303 zeros in the American system. In the British system, a centillion has 600 zeros.” And, no, I am not going to ask Google the obvious follow up question.

My 4 1/2 year old grandson is fascinated by numbers. He likes to watch two groups of videos on YouTube, “Numberblocks” and “Wonderland”. There is an episode of Numberblocks where the focus is on big, big numbers, and you go (in cartoon style with sort of an underlying plot) through all the -illion numbers, until you run out and then reach a googolplex. He tells me that this is the biggest number in the world. He is sure of it. I tell him that I know a bigger number. He doubts me. And then I tell him. It’s googolplex +1. He is stumped. He knows I am correct.

In dictionary.com, when you look up the definition of “centillion”, you get to that part of their definition where the word is used in a sentence. For centillion, I think they have one great sentence: “In physics, one chance in a centillion is considered an impossibility because there are fewer than a centillion seconds before the end of the universe.”

I asked Google if the universe is ever going to end. It told me yes, although the manner of its ending (bang or whimper?) is not yet agreed upon. It might end with the Big Freeze (think Kurt Vonnegut and Ice-9), it might end with the Big Rip, and it might end with the Big Crunch. And then there are those who do not believe that any of these three possibilities are in our future. There are some who believe that there will be the Big Bounce. The proponents of the Big Bounce Theory actually believe in the Big Crunch, but they think that the Big Crunch would be followed by another Bitg Bang. And that this will happen over and over, and I guess has happened over and over.

So is this something worth thinking about? And, as they say, how does it affect the Jews? And how does it affect God and the creation story? Well for one thing, if you grew up thinking that God was all powerful, and that you knew what that meant…….you have been fooled. You had no idea what “all powerful” means.

What got me on this kick tonight? I don’t know. But maybe it had to do with the wine tasting party that Edie and I returned from. It was a small event, featuring local educator Steve Kerbel, whom I know from the Haberman Institute, and who is an expert on Israeli wines. and it was pretty interesting. We tasting a number of different blends and I (whose wine palate is not the most refined) can tell you this. Darom by Yatir Trio Red is as good as it gets. It’s available for about $30 a bottle ($30 usually gets me two or three bottles, but none of them taste like this one). It is bottled somewhere in the Negev. And going back to big numbers, just for a second, Steve talks about some wineries in Israel that put out several hundred thousand bottles a year. He considers those large, I think, and he did describe another winery that puts out 50,000 bottles a year. That one, he said, was small.

Tonight’s event by the way was sponsored by Americans for Ben Gurion University, a group that I still have some involvement with, but on whose board of directors I served for 20 years, including 6 years as national treasurer.

You probably know that the university, situated in Beersheva, and Soroka Hospital, which serves its two medical schools, were bombed during what is temporarily being called the 12 Day War. Let’s hope that name sticks.