Anderson Number

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One Anderson is roughly thought to be the number of 1/3 liter bottles that could by filled from a cubic light year of beer (assuming that a light year is in fact a unit of volume measurement). While ignoring the practical difficulties of getting this done, one can calculate this number to be in the vicinity of:

2.822.441.385.982.264.751.590.694.370.939.300.000.000.000.000.000.000

some prefer simply 2.8 x 10⁵¹ because you use up less ink that way.

Some people think that the Anderson Number is named in honor of Physics Nobel Prize winner Carl David Anderson, while others claim this is just an afterthought.

Even if the universe is a pretty large thing, there is just about enough stuff in it (assuming of course that it is all water, barley, hops and yeast, conveniently forgetting the bottles and labels) to make 30 lots of Andersons. If this gives you a headache, it would be nothing compared to what awaits you and the rest of the insanely drunk human population trying to drink it all before the "best before" date (though in this hypothetical situation, humans technically would not exist anyway). If we assume the human population was 8 billion during the lifetime of the universe (which itself is insane) and we all had a case of beer every day, it would still take us 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the lifespan of the universe to drink it all (that's about as many grains of sand as you have in Sahara). This could easily be called the longest party in history (exactly 2x10²⁷ times longer than the longest currently documented party to this point).

The primary use of the number, however, is not actually to measure bottles of beer, but to deal with complex mathematical equations in the following elegant way (referred to as the Jenkins Reduction):

is Anderson's number

The equation (1) is reduced by adding and dividing by :

Since anything you might find in these functions is likely to be very much smaller than we arrive at this intuitive approximation:

Which is probably much more correct than the answer you would have got if you had actually attempted to solve the equation (1), thus elegantly saving yourself lots of work, and discovering some fundamental truths in the process.