Boggled Intuition

What are the odds of throwing 40 coins into the air and they all come up heads? If you are willing to repeat the experiment every 30 seconds for a billion years, it will happen most likely about 933 times. Our intuition about what is possible and impossible only works for human-sized elapsed times.

Head Throwing Probability

Time	Trials	Number of Coins	Expected Successes
one hour	120	3	15
one year	1,026,720	10	1,002
one century	102,672,000	20	97
1000 years	1,026,720,000	20	979
One million years	1,026,720,000,000	30	956
One billion years	1,026,720,000,000,000	40	933

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)