that's TOTALLY cosmic, dude!
have you seen the movie before sunrise? if you haven't, you should. unless you don't like talking movies. it's entirely talking. but one of my very very all-time favorites.
i bring this up because there's a scene in which the two main characters encounter a fortune teller. she reads their palms, they pay her, and she walks away calling after them, "we are all made up of stardust! stars!" or something close, anyway.
i thought of that scene today while reading from the bryson book i mentioned before. if you all went to college with me, i'd tell you that this book is what foundations of science class should have been. anyway, i'm just starting a chapter called "the mighty atom," and it starts off with this:
"The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be "All things are made of atoms." They are everywhere and they constitute every thing. Look around you. It is all atoms. Not just the solid things like walls and tables and sofas, but the air in between. And they are there in numbers that you really cannot conceive.
"The basic working arrangement of atoms is the molecule (from the Latin for 'little mass'). A molecule is simply two more atoms working together in a more or less stable arrangement: add two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen and you have a molecule of water. Chemists tend to think in terms of molecules rather than elements in much the way that writers tend to think in terms of words and not letters, so it is molecules they count, and these are numerous to say the least. At sea level, at a temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit, one cubic centimeter of air (that is, a space about the size of a sugar cube) will contain 45 billion billion molecules. And they are in every single cubic centimeter you see around you. Think how many cubic centimeters there are in the world outside your window--how many sugar cubes it would take to fill that view. Then think how many it would take to build a universe. Atoms, in short, are very abundant.
"They are also fantasitically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms--up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested--probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.)"
i'd heard this all before, of course, but... the little things that make me up were once in space, burning, making up things bigger than i can conceive, further away than i can conceive. that's very cool.
in other, more mundane news, i dozed off for a while this morning and dreamt of eating a footstool. tasted like cookie.
i bring this up because there's a scene in which the two main characters encounter a fortune teller. she reads their palms, they pay her, and she walks away calling after them, "we are all made up of stardust! stars!" or something close, anyway.
i thought of that scene today while reading from the bryson book i mentioned before. if you all went to college with me, i'd tell you that this book is what foundations of science class should have been. anyway, i'm just starting a chapter called "the mighty atom," and it starts off with this:
"The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be "All things are made of atoms." They are everywhere and they constitute every thing. Look around you. It is all atoms. Not just the solid things like walls and tables and sofas, but the air in between. And they are there in numbers that you really cannot conceive.
"The basic working arrangement of atoms is the molecule (from the Latin for 'little mass'). A molecule is simply two more atoms working together in a more or less stable arrangement: add two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen and you have a molecule of water. Chemists tend to think in terms of molecules rather than elements in much the way that writers tend to think in terms of words and not letters, so it is molecules they count, and these are numerous to say the least. At sea level, at a temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit, one cubic centimeter of air (that is, a space about the size of a sugar cube) will contain 45 billion billion molecules. And they are in every single cubic centimeter you see around you. Think how many cubic centimeters there are in the world outside your window--how many sugar cubes it would take to fill that view. Then think how many it would take to build a universe. Atoms, in short, are very abundant.
"They are also fantasitically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms--up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested--probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.)"
i'd heard this all before, of course, but... the little things that make me up were once in space, burning, making up things bigger than i can conceive, further away than i can conceive. that's very cool.
in other, more mundane news, i dozed off for a while this morning and dreamt of eating a footstool. tasted like cookie.