One subway ride in NYC costs $3. Gizmodo has been around for 24 years. The Sun is just one of some several hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, which is also just one of some trillions of galaxies in the universe. In science, a hypothesis is better tested if it’s weathered a good number of empirical studies. The equations describing how the world works essentially place one number in relation to another.

Our reality is deeply steeped in numbers—a realization discussed at length (no pun intended) in Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7 , by Richard Elwes. The book discusses not only incomprehensibly large numbers but also numbers that sound small but represent incomprehensibly large concepts.…