Atoms - Way to know ourselves
Lets talk about something real. Atoms. Everything in the world that’s ever been, was and will ever be, is made of atoms. Period. You, me and everything else around us is made up of different kind of atoms. I remember standing in the middle of the mall the other day and thinking to myself: “Wow, all of this stuff came out out of the earth and ground?”. Everything we see is just collection of tiny entities call atoms. However, current atoms in your body are not the same atoms that were present in you, oh lets say 10 years ago, or even 10 days ago. That’s right. You’re only a temporary collection of assorted atoms. In other words, different kinds of atoms have to come together at some point in time just to form YOU; then to disband and be replaced by other atoms (at different times of course). Some scientists hypothesize that by the age of 30 all of the atoms in our body have been replaced by new ones; and that’s not even the strange part. Think of this: Atoms don’t age. They don’t just die. Radioactive atoms do decay but non-radioactive atoms are permanently stable as far as we can tell. After we die, atoms that make up our body are recycled. Some of them end up in ground, some in air while some end up in other objects. That would mean you might be made of same atoms as Hitler, Plato or even Jesus Christ was made of. You also might be containing same atoms that may have been in Great Wall Of China, bottom of the ocean, moon, dinosaurs and even Turkish hashish from Anatolia’s mountains. As a matter of fact, it’s a statistical certainty that you’re made of same atoms which some famous people were made of; or at least those atoms were part of you at some point in your life.
Question is: if atoms in our body are constantly getting replaced, then how come we don’t feel that kind of change? How come we don’t sense when our old atoms get replaced by new ones? Answer is two part I think. First, change is so gradual and slow that we really have no senses to feel this type of change. There are approximately 7*1027 in a human body. That’s 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. That’s a whole lot of atoms. Second, atoms in our body have to follow certain rules and paths. Think of water that makes up rivers and streams. Water is constantly changing and cycling, but the river itself always stays the same. It’s always (more or less) of the same shape. So, it’s the interaction between atoms that’s important and not the atoms themselves.
We’re made of the same stuff as everything in our universe is made of. Stars, galaxies, rivers, mountains, and everything we can observe are all made of same stuff. It’s just order of the stuff that makes up different shapes, molecules, cells, tissue and everything else material. That would mean that when we observe (or consciously thinking) our universe, essentially we’re observing ourselves. Carl Sagan once said: “We are the way for The Cosmos to know itself.” Think of that next time you go to Wall-Mart and are surrounded by all of that stuff.
May 16th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Man, however, is not an ordinary mass, consisting of spinning atoms and molecules, and containing merely heat-energy. He is a mass possessed of certain higher qualities by reason of the creative principle of life with which he is endowed. His mass, as the water in an ocean wave, is being continuously exchanged, new taking the place of the old. Not only this, but he grows propagates, and dies, thus altering his mass independently, both in bulk and density. What is most wonderful of all, he is capable of increasing or diminishing his velocity of movement by the mysterious power he possesses by appropriating more or less energy from other substance, and turning it into motive energy. But in any given moment we may ignore these slow changes and assume that human energy is measured by half the product of man’s mass with the square of a certain hypothetical velocity.