Every measuring instrument/device have percentage errors. And due to these percentage errors we can never consider any measurement to be a perfect whole number.

Eg: If we manage to measure out 1.0g of matter, we still can't say that it can't be 1.01g(which would no longer make it a whole number.).

So the question is, are whole numbers possible?

Recently a news report used the word 'thousand billion' and I wondered why they did not just say 'trillion'? But according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(numbers)#Smaller_than_10.E2.88.9230) a thousand billion is one above a trillion. 

Here's the problem:

A billion is 1 followed by 9 zeroes.

A trillion is 1 followed by 12 zeroes.

A thousand billion is 1 followed by 15 zeroes.

Is Wikipedia wrong? The difference between 12 and 9 is 3, which is a thousand in terms of zeroes. So, isn't a trillion and a thousand billion the same thing?

I've just watched a TV program about the biggest number, the universe and - of course - infinity. It said that a number named "Graham" was so big that there was not enough space in the entire universe to write it down. So if there is a number that actually has and end - which was bigger than the universe - then there can't be an everlasting universe! Or can there?

I decided to find out how many results Google returned when performing a search for numbers 0-10. All of them returned results between 7-17 billion, apart from 9, which returned less than 1 billion.  Can anyone think why?

I know how and why minutes, hours and degrees are derived from the number 60, but why are seconds divided by 10ths, 100ths, 1000ths etc rather than 60ths like minutes and hours?