en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity
1 correction found
10500 by some estimates
This number is missing an exponent. The standard estimate is about 10^500 vacua, not 10,500.
Full reasoning
The text as shown says 10500, which means ten thousand five hundred. But the standard estimate for the string-theory landscape is 10^500 (ten to the 500th power), not 10,500.
A strong check comes from the way the estimate is derived. In a Scientific American article by Joseph Polchinski and Raphael Bousso, the authors explain that if roughly 500 independent "handles" each admit 10 flux choices, then the number of configurations is 10^500. In normalized plain-text fetches, superscripts are often flattened, so this can appear as 10 500; the surrounding explanation makes clear it means 10 raised to the 500th power, not the integer 10,500.
Quanta Magazine likewise describes the landscape as having at least 10^500 different configurations. So as presented here, the article drops the exponent and changes the meaning by hundreds of orders of magnitude.
2 sources
- The String Theory Landscape | Scientific American
If we suppose that each handle can have from zero to nine flux lines (10 possible values), then there would be 10 500 possible configurations.
- Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything? | Quanta Magazine
In the early 2000s it was shown that there are at least 10 500 different configurations of the six compact dimensions, each theoretically undergirding a universe with different properties.