Side length5.7 hundredths m
538 millionHydrogen atoms
1.1 billionBohr radii
Standard 3x3x3 competition size; 57 mm per side
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash
Rubik's Cube
43 quintillion combinations, one solved state/Everyday Objects
Invented by Hungarian architect Erno Rubik in 1974, the Rubik's Cube has exactly 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible configurations but only one solution. It took Rubik himself over a month to solve his own creation the first time. The current world record for a human solve is under 3.5 seconds, and robots can now do it in under 0.4 seconds. Over 450 million cubes have been sold worldwide.
Measurements
Mass1.2 tenths kg
48,000Mosquito weights
8 thousandthsMicrowaves
~120 g for a standard-weight cube
Volume185 millionths m³
3.9 tenthsRed Solo cups
1.8 hundredthsWatermelons
32.2 billionthsGoodyear blimps
185 mL; a cube 5.7 cm on each side
World record solve time3.13 s
5.8 thousandthsSnooze alarms
10.4Blinks of an eye
Max Park, June 2023; human single solve
Robot solve time record3 tenths s
120 billionthsLunar months
565 millionthsSnooze alarms
9.7 billionthsEarth years
Mitsubishi robot, 2024; blink and you miss it