4 ms·
If current Wikipedia is printed in a book form, it will span about 2000 books, each with 1000 A4 size pages and still not including diagrams, images and equatio
by sytelus 13y ago
If current Wikipedia is printed in a book form, it will span about 2000 books, each with 1000 A4 size pages and still not including diagrams, images and equations.
But Wikipedia is extremely shallow.
A PHD typically requires study of 250 to 400 textbooks starting from Kindergarden (these are strictly course requirements). If you assume there are about 10,000 sub-sub fields of expertise for human kind (everything from sub-sub field in genetics to sub-sub field in airplane design) I think there may be about 1 million textbooks currently in print that covers pretty much every core expertise.
But again textbooks are not deep enough either. There are 1.3 million papers/research articles that gets published every year. A conservative estimate of all research articles ever published might be 50 million. That would be about about 250,000 printed books, each about 1000 pages.
I think we can comfortably say that most of the core human knowledge can be fit in to about 1 to 2 million printed books, each about of size 1000 pages.