How much time do you spend thinking about atoms? Probably not that much since you can’t see them and most of us have no real reason to ponder them in any great detail outside of a science class. But the atomic world is endlessly fascinating and the idea that everything, everywhere is made of atoms is really an undersold aspect of reality. Tiny, little atoms just group together and, depending how they’re grouped, can make everything from distant nebulas to tacos to Taylor Swift. And the atoms in all of them are very similar. Wild stuff. Let’s check out some more!
10. A Human Hair is About 500,000 Atoms Across
If you’re describing something that’s preposterously small, you might use the idiom “a hair’s breadth” which literally means the width of a hair. Hairs are pretty narrow, after all, so it’s a decent comparison. But hair is narrow in a relative way, like compared to a rope or your arm. Compared to atoms? Not so much.
The average human hair is 500,000 atoms across. In 2004, researchers developed the first microscope able to clearly view things at a resolution of 0.6 angstroms. Angstroms are the smallest wavelength of light and your hair is 500,000 times bigger. That’s because the average atom is one angstrom in diameter. Depending on the hair, it may be 300,000 to 1 million atoms across.
9. There Are More Atoms in a Human Body Than Stars in the Universe
If a hair has about a half million atoms just to get across it, what does the human body hold? Short answer: a lot. The human body has more atoms than the entire universe has stars. Look at you, being all bigger than the universe. Not bad.
Ironically, most of your atoms are carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen. That’s about 96% of you and the rest is things like calcium, magnesium, copper, gold, and several others. But in terms of sheer numbers, what does that even mean? How many stars are in the universe?
That’s something we have to speculate about because we can’t see the entire universe. However, thanks to what we have seen we can do some math and come up with an estimate. The number we’ve settled on is about 200 billion trillion. That number is so ludicrous it may as well just say 200 squidillion because your brain really can’t conceive what it means beyond “a lot.”
One estimate for a more precise number of atoms in the human body is 10^27. That’s 1 octillion. Others have said you may have up to 6.5 octillion. Because your atoms come and go over your lifetime – you breathe them in and out, you ingest and excrete them constantly, it’s been suggested every one of us contains atoms that have been in every human that ever lived and one atom from every breath every human has ever taken. Nice.
8. An Atom is Many Thousands of Times Bigger Than its Own Nucleus
Because atoms are so small it’s really hard for most of us to put them in perspective or think about them in any meaningful way in our day-to-day lives. Sure, they exist but what difference does that make when you’re busy making dinner or trying to clean up after the dog? Not much.
Still, when you get a chance to put them in perspective, the result can be amazing. For instance, every atom has a nucleus in which you can find protons and neutrons and that’s orbited by electrons.
As small as atoms are, the nucleus is obviously smaller, but how much? If an atom was as big as a stadium, the nucleus would be handheld. If you need more specifics, two analogies based on different stadiums might help. Football fan? A football stadium-sized atom has a blueberry-sized nucleus. Baseball fame? Now you’re looking at a ping pong ball nucleus.
In terms of simple difference by the numbers, an atom is about 100,000 times bigger than its own nucleus.
7. It’s Plausible You Share Up to 200 Billion Atoms with William Shakespeare
We said earlier that you share atoms with everyone who has ever lived, so let’s look at that a little more closely. Shakespeare is the common figure used in these speculations regarding whether you could have shared atoms with the bard. Most of you is hydrogen and then oxygen ranks second and yes, you definitely shared air with Shakespeare. But even your carbon may have been bound up within him once.
Given the journey from being forged in a star, launched in a comet, scattered across the earth, and cycled through potential life forms for millions of years before Shakespeare stumbled upon that carbon atom in a piece of chicken or a sandwich he had one day, it’s arguably a miracle any atom ended up anywhere. And, by the same token, equally plausible it traveled from him to you over the years.
If you look beyond the carbon, some researchers have speculated you didn’t just share a few atoms with Shakespeare but billions of them. Maybe as much as 200 billion. The air he breathed filled your lungs, his sweat became part of the water you drank, the food you ate, and so on. And Shakespeare, of course, is just one example. Pick anyone from history, literally any human ever, and the result is the same.
6. 98% of Your Atoms Are Replaced Every Year
Being made up of octillions of atoms makes you a very busy person on an atomic level, but there’s even more action going on than it seems at first. Your atoms are far from static and they are constantly coming and going. It’s not just the air you breathe, it’s everything.
Your body is constantly building new cells. You slough off dead skin and the layers renew. You grow new hair. You sweat, you urinate, you excrete. You are always losing and rebuilding yourself. You make new blood, new bones, everything, constantly, your whole life. You renew yourself so much that every single year you replace 98% of your atoms. Even half of your carbon atoms, like the ones in your bones, are replaced every couple of months.
This cycle of replacing and rebuilding is what allows us all to be connected atomically to folks like Shakespeare. If you’re made of six octillion atoms and you replace 98% a year, that’s 5.88 octillion atoms every year of your life, the same as everyone else. That means you need to take in a new 5.88 octillion over the course of every year and those are obviously coming, in part, from everyone else.
5. Weight Loss Happens When You Exhale Carbon Atoms
As big as the weight loss industry is, there’s not a lot of time devoted to the science of what losing weight even means. You hear plenty about burning calories through exercise and diet and all that good stuff, but what does that actually mean? To lose weight you have to lose mass, where does that mass go when you exercise? Atoms, and a lot of them, need to physically be removed from your body.
When you lose weight, it comes out of your face holes. Working out breaks down the bonds between the atoms that make up fat molecules. But on an atomic level, it all needs to go somewhere. Part of this is done through breathing as the fat molecules are converted to carbon dioxide which you breathe out during the process of exercising. So your personal trainer was right when they said you need to remember to breathe properly because that’s actually how the fat is escaping.
Fat is stored in your body as triglycerides which are, like almost all of you, hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. One-fifth of them are converted to water, which you can sweat or urinate out, and four-fifths become CO2.
Losing 10 lbs means that about 1.6 pounds was turned into water, and you can gain that back pretty easily by rehydrating yourself. But 8.4 pounds are going to be exhaled and the only way to gain that back is through replacing the carbon, which requires you to eat or drink enough to build the fat up again.
4. Only Half of the Atoms in Your Body Come From this Galaxy
We’re still not done with the atoms in your body yet. They may have been in everyone else in the world at some point, but that’s just the world. The universe is vast and your atoms weren’t born on earth.
Not only are all the atoms in your body not from Earth, they’re not from this solar system or even this galaxy. About half of the atoms that make up every one of us came to the Milky Way from some other galaxy. You’ve already traveled further through space than any Captain in Starfleet history.
Supernovas expel incredible amounts of matter into space and those atoms get pulled into neighboring galaxies as they spread. Some of that made it to our galaxy, our solar system, our planet, and eventually into you.
3. Graphene is One Atom Thick and Incredibly Versatile
Up to this point, we’ve been very focused on huge numbers of atoms, so why not look in the other direction and appreciate graphene for a moment? You may have heard the word before as it’s been a darling of science news for at least a decade. People have written articles about the possibilities of making all kinds of things out of graphene but what does that have to do with atoms?
Graphene can construct things that are thinner than anything you could imagine. You can make something out of graphene that is one atom thick. In 2008, researchers made a graphene balloon that was strong enough to hold gasses despite being only one atom thick. Knowing how many atoms are in a human hair, and how strong a human hair is, this is pretty close to unbelievable when you try to picture it.
One-atom thick sheets of graphene have been touted as the supermaterial of the future. Stronger than diamond, more conductive than gold, they’re poised to become the supermaterial of tomorrow for computer chips, building materials, and more. The problem is the process of making and using graphene is time-consuming and expensive. But one day it won’t be and then we’ll see what one atom of carbon can do.
2. The Estimated Number of Atoms in the Universe is a Number You’ve Never Heard Of
We’ve covered some big numbers already so let’s go for the biggest number of all. We compared atoms in the human body to stars in the universe and that got us somewhere preposterous with the octillion figure. So what about atoms in the entire universe?
This is wildly speculative math, but that’s part of the fun. Based on what we know about the number of galaxies in the universe and atoms that make up a galaxy we can do some fancy extrapolations and come up with an answer that is so absurd there’s almost no way to guess if we’re just making these words up without Googling it.
Based on estimates of the known universe, which is not the entire universe, it’s been proposed that there are between ten quadrillion vigintillion and one-hundred thousand quadrillion vigintillion atoms. What the heck is a vigintillion, anyway? If you’re more of a numbers person that’s 10^78 to 10^82 atoms. So yeah, a one with 82 zeroes. Who even bothered to name that?
1. All of Humanity Could be Reduced to the Size of a Sugar Cube If We Removed the Empty Space in Atoms
Let’s say a guy weighs 200 lbs, and he’s 6’2”. We know he may be made up of 6 octillion atoms. Seems like a small space in which to fit those atoms but remember that each atom is also full of nothing. We noted earlier that an atom holds a nucleus, but the atom is 100,000 times bigger than the nucleus. And there’s also space between every atom in a molecule and between all the molecules that make up matter. Matter, as dense as any given bit of it may seem, is full of nothing.
There are 8 billion people in the world right now and each one, made of their octillions of cells, is full of vast emptiness. There’s so much emptiness in your atoms that if we removed it all, if we were somehow able to squish atoms down to remove every bit of that space we could fit the entire human race into the space of a single sugar cube.
You wouldn’t want to try to lift that sugar cube of humanity because it would still have the same weight as all of mankind, it’d just be super dense material. It’s all thanks to matter being 99.9999999% empty. In relative terms, we’re wisps, light as air and barely there.