Mom asks Daniel how many ways a deck of cards could be arranged before they start playing.

He says millions.

The answer is about eight followed by sixty-seven zeros.

That number -- 52 factorial, written in mathematics as 52 with an exclamation mark -- is what you get when you multiply 52 by 51 by 50, all the way down to one. Every card you place narrows the options. Every choice multiplies the possibilities. And the result is a number so large it is on roughly the same scale as estimates for the number of atoms in the Milky Way galaxy.

The practical consequence of that number is this: every time you properly shuffle a deck of cards, you have almost certainly created an arrangement that has never existed before in the history of the universe. Even if every human who has ever lived had shuffled a deck every second of their e ...