# @gravitonomy on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DZAsKbWGeN0
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/66256524-gravitonomy-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/45cba1a07b.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-05-31T17:05:27.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Gravitonomy (@gravitonomy) — https://gondola.cc/gravitonomy

## Caption

A deck of 52 cards has 52! possible arrangements, about 8 × 10⁶⁷. For comparison, only about 4 × 10¹⁷ seconds have passed since the Big Bang. If you shuffled a deck every second from the birth of the universe until today, you would not even begin to make a dent in the number of possible orders.

Now imagine every one of the roughly 100 billion humans who have ever lived shuffling a deck every second of every day for their entire lives. Even multiplying all those shuffles together produces a number that is microscopic compared with 52!. The gap is so large that the comparison itself almost becomes meaningless.

That is why mathematicians often say a thoroughly shuffled deck is likely in an arrangement never seen before in cosmic history. The number of possible card orders is not merely large. It is so unimaginably vast that it dwarfs the age of the universe, the number of people who have lived, and nearly every quantity encountered in nature. 

Source: 
Diaconis, Persi. “Mathematical Developments from the Analysis of Riffle Shuffling.” Groups, Combinatorics and Geometry, 2003. 

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#deck #52factorial #science #maths #cards

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## Tags

deck, cards, science, 52factorial, maths

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