Although unlikely to be supported by the context, I think the quote would have been stronger if the ! in 10^9! were an operator and not punctuation. While the

Although unlikely to be supported by the context, I think the quote would have been stronger if the ! in 10^9! were an operator and not punctuation. While the Large Hadron Collider is experimenting with particles less than 10^-10 m in size over distances on the scale of 10^4 m, computer scientists can easily run into combinatorial explosions that would make 10^9! seem puny. (Not just computer scientists, too -- you can probably find code that tries to operate like that on the Daily WTF.)