Counting
I weigh about 155 lbs. If you convert that to metric units, it’s about 70,306 grams, which is about as many paperclips.
The average human body is mostly water, about 80-some percent. There’s other stuff in there too, though. In fact, the rough breakdown by weight is about 65% Oxygen (66 if you take a deep breath ;), 18% Carbon, 10% Hydrogen, 3% Nitrogen, 1.5% Calcium and 1.2% Phosphorus. There’s a bunch of smaller amounts of other stuff in there too.
Using those numbers, you find that the I have about 45,699 grams of Oxygen in me (O boy!), 12,655 grams of Carbon, 7,030 grams of Hydrogen, 2,109 grams of Nitrogen, 1,054 grams of Calcium, and 843 grams of Phosphorus.
There’s a cool constant that was coined by a guy named Avogadro. The constant describes the number of atoms (or sometimes molecules) in this thing called a mole. What’s extra cool about this number is that if you look at the periodic table of elements (one of the coolest tables that ever existed, IMHO) you can figure out how many grams are in a mole of any type of atom. That value is called the atomic weight.
If you take the number of grams of each element that makes me up and divide them by their respective atomic weights you can find out how many moles of each element are in me. If you then multiply those moles by Avogadro’s constant, you can find out how many atoms are inside of me…
… Teeny tiny atoms. Lots of them. If you add them all up you find there’s about 6.67E+27 of them. That’s about 6,670,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s almost 7 octillion. By the way, it goes million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion. Like I said, lots of them.
Now think about that. Really, really think about it. I am made up of about 7 octillion individually insignificant atoms. Alone, they do nothing; they float around and bump into each other and give physicists something to think about. But when you set them all up in the right way you get my hair. You get my taste buds. You get my elbow joints, my lungs, my toe nails, my brain, MY THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS even! MY EVERYTHING!
Woah!
It’s the glorious sum of an astonishing number of tiny parts. A beautiful arithmetic. So beautiful, in fact, I think the whole study of biology should be renamed “aestheticology.”