In reference to your astronomy/philosophy class notes (the best that I can come up with as to what that course is about - look at its introduction page), they state what they're counting: hadrons (actually, just baryons), photons, and neutrinos. At the very least, you have to extend this to quarks if you want to talk about "fundamental particles". To generalize, you need to include all quarks and leptons (which encompasses a wide range of different particle types). This ignores counting things such as gravitrons, and all of the vacuum fluctuation virtual pairs, which are an incredibly huge number (they exist; they're what leads to Hawking Radiation; the only question is just how common they are). As referenced in
this page (postulating a theory as to why vacuum fluctuations occur, based on the reduction of a higher order spacetime), they reference the energy calculation's for Casimir's experiment, which indicates 4.635e110 ergs in a volume of 10^-4 cm^3, indicating 4.635e114ergs/cm^3 = 4.635e120 ergs/m^3. E=mc^2, E is in ergs, m is in kg, and c is in m/s (299,792,458), so the equivalent mass of this much energy per cubic meter is 5.157e103 kg = 5.157e106g. Just to put this into large particles, lets say, neutrons, you've got about 3.106e127 virtual particles per cubic meter (notably more than the rough estimate I had tracked down on the net before... I should check into where they got their source). Given a volume of the present universe at about 1e79 m^3, we're looking at about 3e206 virtual particles in the universe.
Any commentary on these calculations? Regardless of whether we're looking at 1e90 or 3e127 virtual particles per cubic meter currently in the universe, we're looking at a simply mind bogglingly huge number. And they do interact with reality (Casimir effect, Hawking radiation, etc).
If you count virtual particles (which I would think you would have to do), the number you get is staggeringly higher than 1e80 in the universe. Vacuum fluctuations (as with all reality) may just be a manifestation of interactions in some higher order space, but regardless, they are part of reality, and interact with it.
Also, what use in his his calculation is just multiplying by Planck time? All particles interact at once, not one at a time. One would think that, to be fair, he should square the number of particles in the universe before multiplying by Planck time. All in all, the end number of particles (ignoring gravitrons, but incorporating virtual particles), you get about 3e387 "calculations" in the universe. Even if you use his 1e80 number but factor in that every particle in the universe interacts with every other one, that's 4.3e220.
Regardless of all of this, most of my disagreements lie in the use of his number, not his calculation of it.
------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."
[This message has been edited by Rei, 11-18-2003]
™ Version 4.2