You’re bored. You have an iPhone in your hand. Maybe you saw a TikTok about it, or maybe you just wanted to hear a robot voice struggle with linguistics. You hold the side button or shout across the room: hey siri what's 1 trillion to the 10th power.
The result? A rhythmic, almost hypnotic repetition of the word "zero" that lasts for what feels like an eternity.
It’s one of those weird internet phenomena that shouldn't be funny, yet somehow, listening to a sophisticated AI descend into a stuttering mess of "zero zero zero zero" is peak entertainment. But if you're looking for the actual math, or wondering why your phone doesn't just say "one septillion" or use scientific notation immediately, there is a fascinating collision of floating-point arithmetic and user interface design happening under the hood.
Math is hard. For humans, it’s about logic. For Siri, it’s about how many bits can fit into a specific memory register before the software decides to just start reading the string of digits out loud.
The Raw Number: Breaking Down the Calculation
Let's get the "boring" part out of the way first. When you ask hey siri what's 1 trillion to the 10th power, you are asking for a number that is truly, staggeringly large.
A trillion is $10^{12}$ (a one followed by twelve zeros). When you raise that to the 10th power, you multiply the exponents. $12 \times 10 = 120$. So, the answer is 1 followed by 120 zeros. In scientific notation, that is $1 \times 10^{120}$.
To give you some perspective, there are estimated to be about $10^{80}$ atoms in the observable universe. You are asking Siri for a number that is $10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000$ times larger than the number of atoms in existence. It is a "Novemtrigintillion" if we’re using the short scale naming convention common in the US and UK.
Most calculators give up and show $1e120$. Siri, however, tries to be helpful. Too helpful.
Why Siri Actually Says "Zero" for Five Minutes
If you’ve ever actually sat through the whole response, you know Siri starts with "The answer is one..." and then proceeds to lose her mind.
The reason this became a viral trend isn't just the math—it's the text-to-speech (TTS) engine. Siri is programmed to read the result displayed on the screen. When the result is an integer rather than scientific notation, the voice engine interprets every single digit. Since the number is a 1 followed by 120 zeros, she reads every. single. one.
Wolfram Alpha often powers Siri’s more complex mathematical queries. If you ask a standard calculator app this question, it snaps to scientific notation because it's efficient. Siri's integration sometimes forces a literal interpretation of the decimal string. It's essentially a "buffer overflow" of human patience.
Interestingly, Apple has tweaked this over various iOS updates. In earlier versions of iOS, Siri would go on for a long time. In more recent iterations, the AI might cut itself off or switch to a more concise "1 times 10 to the 120th power." But the "glitch" remains a favorite for people trying to make their phones sound like they’re "beatboxing."
The Limits of Digital Arithmetic
Computers don't think in numbers like we do. They think in binary.
When you perform a calculation like hey siri what's 1 trillion to the 10th power, the system uses something called double-precision floating-point format. This is the IEEE 754 standard.
Most modern systems can handle numbers up to about $1.8 \times 10^{308}$. So, $10^{120}$ is well within the "range" of what the processor can calculate without hitting an "Infinity" error. The issue is the "presentation layer."
How do you show a number that wide on a screen that is only three inches across?
You can't.
So the software makes a choice. It either shrinks the font (doesn't work for 120 digits), uses scientific notation, or creates a scrollable string. Siri’s TTS engine grabs that string and starts talking. It’s a classic example of a "Leaky Abstraction." The complexity of the underlying math leaks into the user interface in a way that feels broken but is technically accurate.
Why We Are Obsessed With Breaking AI
There’s a psychological component here. We live in an era where AI like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini are becoming eerily human. They write poetry. They code apps. They give life advice.
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Asking hey siri what's 1 trillion to the 10th power is a way of reminding ourselves that, at the end of the day, these are just machines following instructions.
It’s a digital "poke the bear" moment.
We love finding the "edge cases." Whether it's asking a chatbot to say "poop" 10,000 times or making Siri read 120 zeros, humans have a fundamental drive to find the boundaries of a system. It’s the same reason people used to try to "kill" Cleverbot or find the end of the map in a video game. It makes the technology feel less intimidating when we can make it look silly.
The Mathematical Scale of 10 to the 120th
Let’s talk about how big this actually is.
In physics, there is a concept called the Shannon Number. This is the estimated number of possible moves in a game of chess. That number is roughly $10^{120}$.
Isn't that wild?
When you ask Siri that specific question, you are essentially asking for a number equivalent to every possible way a chess game could ever be played. No wonder the phone sounds like it’s having a breakdown.
If you were to try and write this number down by hand, at a rate of one zero per second, it would take you two minutes just to write the zeros. If you tried to count to this number, the universe would end before you got even a fraction of a percent of the way there.
- A Million: Seconds since 12 days ago.
- A Trillion: Seconds since 30,000 BC.
- 10 to the 120th: There isn't a time-based comparison because the number is too big for the age of the universe.
Does This Work on Other Assistants?
If you ask Google Assistant or Alexa the same question, the results vary.
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Google is generally "smarter" about shortening the answer immediately. It will usually say "The answer is 1e120" or "1 followed by 120 zeros." It lacks the comedic "zero zero zero" stamina that Siri has.
Alexa usually defaults to scientific notation as well. Apple’s Siri has always had a bit more of a "literal" personality, which is why these specific math memes tend to stick to the iPhone ecosystem.
Real-World Use Cases for Giant Numbers
You might think, "Who actually needs to calculate $10^{120}$?"
Not many people.
But scientists dealing with combinatorics, cryptography, or statistical mechanics deal with exponents that climb this high surprisingly often. For example, when calculating the probability of a specific set of molecules arranging themselves in a certain way, or the number of possible states in a quantum system, we blow past a "trillion" almost instantly.
The Google search for hey siri what's 1 trillion to the 10th power isn't usually coming from a lab, though. It's coming from a living room. It's digital curiosity.
Actionable Takeaways for the Curious
If you want to play around with Siri's mathematical limits without just hearing "zero" for five minutes, try these:
- Ask for the "Googol": Ask Siri what a Googol is. She’ll tell you it’s 1 followed by 100 zeros. It’s the namesake of Google, but Siri handles it with a bit more grace.
- Test the "Divide by Zero" logic: It's an old one, but asking Siri what zero divided by zero is still triggers a snarky response about Cookie Monster having no friends.
- Scientific Notation mode: If you actually want to see these numbers without the glitch, turn your iPhone calculator to landscape mode. It unlocks the scientific calculator functions and handles exponents properly without the "zero" spam.
- Use Wolfram Alpha: For serious math, don't rely on the voice feedback. Look at the data card Siri pulls up. It contains the prime factorization and other properties of the number that are much more interesting than the string of zeros.
Basically, Siri isn't broken; she's just a literalist. She is doing exactly what you asked: calculating a massive number and trying to tell you what it is. If that involves five minutes of rhythmic zeros, that's on you for asking.
Next time you’re looking to kill time, maybe ask her to beatbox instead. It’s a lot easier on the ears than the "Novemtrigintillion" chant.
To see the number in its full glory without the audio, simply type 10^120 into any search engine. You'll see the 1 and the massive block of zeros, and you can appreciate the scale without the robotic stuttering. If you're looking to dive deeper into how computers handle these "BigNums," look up "Arbitrary-precision arithmetic"—it's the reason your phone can even think about numbers this big without exploding.