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Chemical Formula

|< < Prev #3200 (January 28, 2026)

Title text: Some of the atoms in the molecule are very weakly bound.

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Explanation

This is incomplete: This page was created by all of the carbon in the universe. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

This supposed "chemical formula for the universe" merely lists the numbers of atoms of each element that are thought to exist in the observable universe. Usually, chemical formulae imply rather more of a discrete binding together of the atoms involved. They also represent a single molecule of the substance, rather than trying to cover the entire number of atoms in the whole quantity under consideration.

This may be poking some fun at the relative usefulness (or rather, uselessness) of chemical formulas for large organic molecules. While it is a useful concept for teaching people about chemistry and balancing equations, and it was useful in the early days of chemistry to try to categorize and learn about molecules via stoichiometry - it does not give much useful information, such as its structure. For example, even the simple formula C₁₁H₁₅NO₂ has 302 registered isomers.^{[actual citation needed]} Many of them are NOT good to eat.^{[citation needed]} For other purposes, formulae may group the components accordingly, such as CH₃CCl₃ (simplifies to C₂H₃Cl₃, as does an isomer) or [NH₄]₂CO₃ (not usually identified as CH₈O₃N₂, and not strictly an organic compound either).

As is common practice for real compounds that contain organic structures or substructures, the numbers of atoms of carbon and hydrogen are listed before all of the others; the others are listed in alphabetical order. There are estimated to be 10⁸⁰ atoms of hydrogen (H), by far the most common element in the universe. The next most common element, helium (He), is a long way to the right in the list, and out of view, but would be about a third as many as the hydrogens.

In reality, there is not a fixed number of atoms of each element across the lifetime of the universe. The matter originally created in the Big Bang was unbound protons and neutrons. In the first few minutes, some of these combined to form lightweight nuclei, but most remained as protons (i.e. the nuclei of hydrogen atoms). Other more complex atoms, up to atomic mass 56, formed later (and are still being formed) as a result of stellar nucleosynthesis. Still more massive nuclei have been and are being formed via supernova nucleosynthesis. Although the proportions of these atoms depend in a complex way on the fusion processes involved, and on the stabilities of those nuclei, the most massive atoms are generally both short-lived and less favored to form, so their elemental abundances in the universe are very small. As shown above, the number of americium (Am) atoms is much smaller than those of any other element in the visible part of the "formula". There are slightly fewer atoms of americium in the entire universe than the total number of atoms of hydrogen and oxygen in 1.0 L of liquid water.

The title text is probably referencing gravity, because, for the most part, these atoms would be "held together" only by gravity, and it is a very weak bond indeed.

The numbers of atoms are large, but they are not nameless. Using the long and short scales, these numbers can be described as:

Pos	Symb	Name	Quantity	Short Scale name	Long Scale name(s)	Ranked quantity*
1	C	Carbon	1076	Ten quattuorvigintillion	Ten thousand duodecillion Ten duodecilliard	4
2	H	Hydrogen	1080	One hundred quinvigintillion	One hundred tridecilllion	1
3	Ac	Actinium	1067	Ten unvigintillion	Ten undecillion	≈84
4	Ag	Silver	1069	One duovigintillion	One thousand undecillion One undecilliard	≈68
5	Al	Aluminium Aluminum	1075	One quattuorvigintillion	One thousand duodecillion One duodecilliard	14
6	Am	Americium	1026	One hundred septillion	One hundred quadrillion	≈84
7	Ar	Argon	1075	One quattuorvigintillion	One thousand duodecillion One duodecilliard	11
8	As	Arsenic	1070	Ten duovigintillion	Ten thousand undecillion Ten undecilliard	≈40
9	At	Astatine	1047	One hundred quattuordecillion	One hundred thousand septillion One hundred septilliard	≈84
10	Au	Gold	1069	One duovigintillion	One thousand undecillion One undecilliard	≈68
11	B	Boron	1071	One hundred duovigintillion	One hundred thousand undecillion One hundred undecilliard	≈61
12	Ba	Barium	1070	Ten duovigintillion	Ten thousand undecillion Ten undecilliard	≈33
13	Be	Beryllium	1071*	One hundred duovigintillion	One hundred thousand undecillion One hundred undecilliard	≈61
43*	He	Helium	1079*	Ten quinvigintillion	Ten tridecilllion	2
73*	O	Oxygen	1078*	One quinvigintillion	One tridecilllion	3

* - Information not provided by the comic; Source for ranked data, in particular, does not 'entirely' agree with the quantities that are given in the comic.

The formula as it appears in the comic is truncated. The complete formula of the universe in this style (but arranged in decreasing order of abundance after carbon, which also happens to place hydrogen immediately after) would be C₁₀⁷⁷ H₁₀⁸⁰ He₁₀⁷⁹ O₁₀⁷⁸ Ne₁₀⁷⁶ N₁₀⁷⁶ Mg₁₀⁷⁵ Si₁₀⁷⁵ Ar₁₀⁷⁵ Fe₁₀⁷⁶ S₁₀⁷⁶ Ni₁₀⁷⁵ Ca₁₀⁷⁵ Al₁₀⁷⁵ B₁₀⁷¹ Be₁₀⁷¹ Na₁₀⁷⁵ As₁₀⁷² Br₁₀⁷² Li₁₀⁷² Cr₁₀⁷⁵ Ti₁₀⁷⁴ Mn₁₀⁷⁴ P₁₀⁷⁴ K₁₀⁷⁴ V₁₀⁷⁴ Cl₁₀⁷⁴ F₁₀⁷³ Sc₁₀⁷² Co₁₀⁷⁴ Cu₁₀⁷² Zn₁₀⁷³ Ga₁₀⁷² Ge₁₀⁷³ Se₁₀⁷² Kr₁₀⁷² Rb₁₀⁷² Sr₁₀⁷² Y₁₀⁷¹ Zr₁₀⁷² Nb₁₀⁷¹ Mo₁₀⁷¹ Tc₁₀⁰ Ru₁₀⁷¹ Rh₁₀⁷⁰ Pd₁₀⁷¹ Ag₁₀⁷⁰ Cd₁₀⁷¹ In₁₀⁷⁰ Sn₁₀⁷¹ Sb₁₀⁷⁰ Te₁₀⁷² I₁₀⁷¹ Xe₁₀⁷² Cs₁₀⁷⁰ Ba₁₀⁷² La₁₀⁷¹ Ce₁₀⁷² Pr₁₀⁷¹ Nd₁₀⁷² Pm₁₀⁰ Sm₁₀⁷¹ Eu₁₀⁷⁰ Gd₁₀⁷¹ Tb₁₀⁷⁰ Dy₁₀⁷¹ Ho₁₀⁷⁰ Er₁₀⁷¹ Tm₁₀⁷⁰ Yb₁₀⁷¹ Lu₁₀⁷⁰ Hf₁₀⁷⁰ Ta₁₀⁷⁰ W₁₀⁷⁰ Re₁₀⁷⁰ Os₁₀⁷¹ Ir₁₀⁷¹ Pt₁₀⁷¹ Au₁₀⁷⁰ Hg₁₀⁷¹ Tl₁₀⁷⁰ Pb₁₀⁷² Bi₁₀⁷⁰ Po₁₀⁰ At₁₀⁰ Rn₁₀⁰ Fr₁₀⁰ Ra₁₀⁰ Ac₁₀⁰ Th₁₀⁷⁰ Pa₁₀⁰ U₁₀⁷⁰ Np₁₀⁰ Pu₁₀⁰ Am₁₀⁰ Cm₁₀⁰ Bk₁₀⁰ Cf₁₀⁰ Es₁₀⁰ Fm₁₀⁰ Md₁₀⁰ No₁₀⁰ Lr₁₀⁰ Rf₁₀⁰ Db₁₀⁰ Sg₁₀⁰ Bh₁₀⁰ Hs₁₀⁰ Mt₁₀⁰ Ds₁₀⁰ Rg₁₀⁰ Cn₁₀⁰ Nh₁₀⁰ Fl₁₀⁰ Mc₁₀⁰ Lv₁₀⁰ Ts₁₀⁰ Og₁₀⁰ according to estimates of abundance.

Transcript

This is one of 40 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[A long panel with a chemical formula trailing off the right side]

C_10⁷⁶ H_10⁸⁰ Ac_10⁶⁷ Ag_10⁶⁹ Al_10⁷⁵ Am_10²⁶ Ar_10⁷⁵ As_10⁷⁰ At_10⁴⁷ Au_10⁶⁹ B_10⁷¹ Ba_10⁷⁰ Be

[Caption below the panel:] The approximate chemical formula for the universe

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Discussion

Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

pixels-assembly-3.png

how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. —While False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!

(Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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