Have you ever wondered if the universe has a limit—not just in space or time, but in how much it can contain, compute, or express? It turns out, it does. And that limit has a name: Taylor’s Number.
Taylor’s Number is the maximum number of physically distinguishable states the observable universe can support. It’s a real, finite number derived from the size of the observable universe and the smallest possible unit of space—the Planck length. When you divide the radius of the observable universe by the Planck length and square it, you get a number around 2.3 × 10¹²³. That’s a 2.3 followed by 122 zeros. An almost unfathomable figure—yet still not infinite.
Why does this matter? Because it places a hard cap on what can actually happen in our universe. There’s a maximum number of things that can be meaningfully different. No computer, no mind, no galaxy-spanning civilization can exceed this number of distinct physical configurations. It’s like saying the universe has a maximum number of “pixels” it can display or “memory slots” it can hold, and beyond that, differences become indistinguishable—not just to us, but to physics itself.
This changes how we think about mathematics, computation, and even philosophy. While math may speak of infinite precision or infinite sets, Taylor’s Number tells us that only a finite slice of those ideas ever maps onto the real world. In short, reality itself has a resolution limit.
Taylor’s Number doesn’t limit human potential—it defines the outer boundary of what’s physically possible. It’s the cosmic edge between what can be known and what simply cannot exist in any observable way. Far from being a curiosity, this number may turn out to be one of the most fundamental constants in our understanding of the universe.