Prologue: Your Atomic Self

Unknowingly, we plough the dust of stars, blown around us by the wind, and drink the universe in a glass of rain.

—Ihab Hassan

One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet is the most precious thing we have.

—Albert Einstein

What could be more interesting than the story of your life? Well, good news—that’s what this book is about.

Although the text often refers to atoms, they are merely the supporting cast. You are the main character with whom they will interact as you go through the routines, the ecstatic successes, and the profound tragedies of daily life. My role will be to try to show how those same atoms connect you to some of the most amazing things in the universe.

What do atoms have to do with you? Everything. They were present and intimately involved when you and everyone you have ever loved—or hated—did everything that you and they have ever done. Every scent you’ve ever savored, every sight you’ve ever seen, every song you’ve ever enjoyed, every cry or sigh that ever passed your lips sprang from atoms at work within the atmosphere and the darkest recesses of your body. When you eat, the bodies of other living things become part of you. If you cut yourself, the wreckage of dying stars runs out in a stream of ancient atoms that triggered some of the most violent explosions in the cosmos. When you flush your wastes, you scatter the atomic echoes of lightning bolts and volcanoes into a global cycle that may some day return them to you, as unpleasant as that may sound. And whenever you grin, the sparkling of your teeth conceals the dim afterglow of nuclear fallout from Cold War bomb tests over the Pacific.

You are not only made of atoms; you are atoms, and this book, in essence, is an atomic field guide to yourself. All you need in order to interpret your life in primal elemental terms is access to some of the latest scientific information, some new ways to reconsider your world in light of it, and an active imagination. In doing so you will begin to experience a revolution in self-awareness that is playing out on a larger scale around the world.

Long after leaving the Neolithic cultures in which we learned to make crude implements from rocks and minerals, we are entering what might be called a “neo-Neolithic” stage in which the exquisitely crafted silicon chips of computers and the polished glass and metal of powerful microscopes and telescopes enhance our lives and inform our senses. With those new tools to help us build upon knowledge left to us by our forebears, we can replace the early Greek concept of four primary elements of creation—air, water, earth, and fire—with a richer and more useful worldview that arranges more than a hundred kinds of atoms into an orderly periodic table of elements. It shows that the first three items on the traditional list are not fundamental elements but compounds, and that fire is more of a process than an indivisible substance. Such a perspective also helps to reveal with scientific rigor the hidden connections that physically link our bodies as well as our very thoughts and feelings to the atoms of the earth. And in this age of intense technological, cultural, and environmental change, knowing just how intimately bound we are to this planet and to one another has become crucially important. Today more than ever, the lessons of science are key to the well-being of billions of people and the ecosystems that sustain them.

Much still awaits discovery, of course, and future research will surely revise much of what we now believe to be true, perhaps including some of the information in this book. Nobody knows everything, and even geniuses make mistakes. Isaac Newton didn’t know that matter and energy are interchangeable, Albert Einstein resisted quantum theory, and the physicist Ernest Rutherford, who derided all scientific fields other than his own as mere “stamp collecting,” didn’t believe that nuclear weapons or power were feasible. Even the meaning of the term “atom” itself changed during the last century or so. More than two thousand years ago, Greek philosopher-scientists deduced that matter consists of tiny fundamental units and called them “a-toms” or “indivisibles.” In the strictest sense the things that we now call atoms are unworthy of the name because physicists can split them into smaller pieces. The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, for example, smashes subatomic particles into even smaller muons, gluons, and leptons. Therefore, if true a-toms exist, we have not yet found them.

But it would also be incorrect to claim, as some people do, that all scientific facts are too ephemeral to be trustworthy guides to reality. Yes, the frontiers of knowledge are dynamic, but the trailblazers of science leave many reliable paths for you to tread. You can trust, for example, that atoms really do exist. They have distinctive properties and interact in universally predictable ways. Water truly is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, and so is most of your body. And, yes, the same elements that fill a bead of sweat on your brow can also be found in the majestic tail of a comet, in the bones of the planet beneath your feet, and in every other living thing on Earth. This book invites you to travel some of those trusty paths to remarkable new perspectives on yourself and your world that may be surprising but that are nonetheless demonstrably true and potentially transformative.

Let me introduce you now to one of your oxygen atoms. It won’t look like much, basically just a bubble with a speck of matter floating at its center, and from the outside it resembles a featureless Ping-Pong ball. But traits as simple as the number of particles in that central speck or the structure of the outer shell make the properties of such elements as wildly different from one another as the living species they help to produce.

If you are an average-size adult, you carry nearly two thousand trillion trillion oxygen atoms inside you, more numerous than the leaves in every forest on Earth. Imagine singling out one of them from the flesh of your thumb and zooming in for a closer look.

Like all atoms, this one is mostly empty. If you could magnify the jiggling cluster of eight positively charged protons and eight neutral neutrons at its core to the size of a raspberry (which it would then resemble), the negatively charged electrons that encircle it would orbit the berry from about two hundred yards away, roughly twice the length of an American football field. The sphere encompassed by the electrons would contain millions of cubic yards of nothingness, many times the volume of MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. This is what scientists refer to when they say that the substance of your body is mostly empty, an airless vacuum much like the depths of intergalactic space.

No matter how heavy you may feel you are, the emptiness of your atoms means that you are more like a porous froth of atomic Styrofoam than the relatively solid mass you seem to be. And you are lucky that this is so, because if it were not, the ground beneath you might not support your weight. The tiny central nucleus (Greek for “kernel” or “seed”) is so dense that if your body could be packed with deflated atoms rather than the mostly empty ones that comprise you now, the tip of one of your pinkies would weigh close to a billion tons.

Eight electrons circle the nucleus of your chosen oxygen atom. These are not miniature planets limited to a firm orbital plane but stranger, more freely wandering wraiths that act simultaneously as waves and particles, and they swarm around the nucleus at such tremendous speeds that they blur into nested, cloudlike shells. If you were to boost the energy states of electrons such as these, you could make them jump to more distant orbits and make an atom’s surface appear to swell, and physicists can also blast electrons away from inner shells with X-ray lasers in order to produce “hollow” atoms.

But most important from our perspective, some of these electrons can be shared with other atoms, forming the covalent chemical bonds that help to hold your body together. Nudge two oxygen atoms close enough to each other for their outer shells to mesh, and some of their electrons may begin to run loops around both nuclei. Such electron-sharing can yield hundreds of thousands of atomic combinations from muscle filaments and membranes to hormones and hairs.

When two or more atoms hook up in this manner, they form a molecule. The term derives from the diminutive version of the Latin word moles, which itself refers not to small furry beasts but to a “pile of stuff.” A molecule is therefore simply a small pile of stuff. The oxygen atom that is now on display in your imagination is rarely alone but is instead normally part of a molecular team. In your body it is most likely to travel in tandem with another oxygen atom as a molecule of oxygen gas in your bloodstream, or to join two smaller hydrogen atoms to form a water molecule.

The first chapters of this book will help you to get to know both of these molecules and their component atoms better, also revealing some of the ways in which they make you what you are. Many atomic elements can be found in and around you, but fewer than a dozen of the most abundant and biologically critical ones will be prominently featured here. These few will serve to unveil the hidden roles that atoms play in your life and show how they connect you to the rest of the world.

As you read on, you will follow your atoms through wind, waves, fire, and forests to your fingernails. Hydrogen atoms will wriggle into your hair and betray where you live and what you have been drinking. The sodium in your tears will link you to long-dead seas and—strangely enough—to fluttering moths. The carbon in your breath will become cornstalks, then the muscles of a mighty bull, and then the twitching whiskers of a fox. You will find that many of the nitrogen atoms in your muscles once helped to turn the sky blue, phosphorus in your bones helped to turn the waves of an ancient ocean green, calcium in your teeth was mined from rocks by mushrooms, and iron in your blood once destroyed a star. You will also discover that much of what death will eventually do to you is already happening among the atoms of your body at this very moment but that, nonetheless, you and everyone else will always exist somewhere in the fabric of the universe.

Taking on this atomic view of life is much like watching an opera with a playbook at hand. If you were to watch Don Giovanni without understanding Italian, for example, the music might be enjoyable but the story couldn’t grab you. Having a playbook handy would reveal the details of the story that your uninformed eyes and ears would otherwise miss. Similarly, the better you understand the world in atomic terms, the richer your experiences may become.

One of the great gifts of science is the ongoing revelation of what we most truly are. Although it is easy to imagine that cell phones, supermarkets, and city life have isolated us from nature, it is only our awareness of still being connected to it that sometimes lags behind the burst of new technology and knowledge that has erupted during the last century. We can never really lose touch with atomic nature because, whether we know it or not, we are too much a part of it. The task that we now face is not so much to reconnect physically as to more closely attune our worldviews to the fascinating reality that Earth-orbiting telescopes, atom-probing microscopes, and other complex inventions have only recently uncovered for us.

It can be thrilling to revel in the wonder of being direct relatives of the stars, as when one of Joni Mitchell’s songs tells us that “we are stardust” and billion-year-old carbon. Those words from the song “Woodstock” capture the essence of insights that science can now confirm, although some nerds among us might also feel compelled to add that most of our carbon is actually much older than that, and that some of it is a few weeks or months old (more on that later).

The main point here is that such insights are aesthetically and philosophically inspiring but also increasingly valuable for practical reasons in this most recent stage of history, which many scientists are calling the Anthropocene epoch, the age of humans. We have become so numerous, our technology so powerful, and our lives and cultures so globally interconnected that we are now a force of nature on a geological scale. Our carbon emissions alone are sufficient to stop the next ice age, to lift the surfaces of the oceans high enough to flood coastlines, and to drive entire species to extinction. And the contents of our hearts and minds now trigger actions that echo around the world and deep into the future.

In this setting, understanding our atomic connections to the earth becomes less a matter of choice than a necessity, and science is our clearest window on the truth. The biologist and author E. O. Wilson recently put it this way: “Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the ‘environmentalist’ view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.” Rather than rely solely on our limited senses as our early ancestors did, we can now use new information about the previously hidden atomic nature of things to better interpret what our senses tell us and, we may hope, to produce more sound and sustainable ways of living as well.

Gifted science communicators from Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson to Brian Cox, Brian Greene, and Michio Kaku have done a spectacular job of showing us the subatomic realm and the cosmos, but much of the middle ground between those outer limits of size remains to be interpreted from an atomic perspective. Vivid pictures and documentaries help us to imagine tiny quarks and vast galaxies, but it can be difficult to bring them all down to Earth, so to speak. Readily observable species and cells may appear to be simple by comparison to the marvels that mass spectrometers and space telescopes reveal, but most living things are actually too complex and unpredictable to be described with the precision that physicists might expect from their studies of protons or pulsars. Just imagine trying to predict the exact route that a butterfly will follow through a meadow, to calculate exactly when a particular sprouting seed will open its first blossom, or to list in advance all the thoughts that will pop into your head tomorrow. Modeling the motions of electrons and planets is, by comparison, relative child’s play.

It is into this lively jungle of daily experience that the following chapters will lead you, armed not with esoteric formulae but with intuitive, sensory, and practical examples of the connections between atoms, yourself, and the world you live in. But how can we make atoms seem real if, as we so often presume, we can’t see them?

It’s simple. Just look in the mirror and you will see trillions upon trillions of them staring back at you from the contours of your face. If you can recognize atoms in their teeming multitudes for what they are, then you don’t have to view them individually in order to sense their presence any more than you need to analyze every grain of sand in order to enjoy a day at the beach. What you can do instead is to let reputable experts work out the more granular details for you and then use what they find to better inform your life.

Amazingly, however, even individual atoms are now more accessible to us than they used to be, and if you want to look one of them in the eye, guides to some of the latest scientific discoveries can help you to do so. The online site Electron Microscopy—A Journey into Nano-Cosmos, hosted by the Triebenberg Laboratory at the Technical University of Dresden, recently presented a series of photographs that zoom in on microscopic specks of gold. The series closes with a final shot that magnifies the sample more than a million times, showing gold atoms arranged like marbles in orderly ranks and files.

Not only are individual atoms becoming visible to us, they are also audible. An online program posted by the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and titled “The Radioactive Orchestra” allows you to compose a melody using sounds that represent the distinctive energetic frequencies of atoms undergoing radioactive decay. The host site archives tones that represent energy emissions from dozens of unstable elements from carbon-14 to potassium-40. “Our goal is to inspire,” the home page explains. “We hope to achieve increased awareness of the beauty of nature, even at its smallest scale, and hence to stimulate interest in basic science. Equally important to us is the creative, musical dimension.… There is a lot in common between science and art. We hope the Radioactive Orchestra will contribute to strengthening the bond between the two.”

Writing this book has been a personal exploration for me as well. It isn’t easy, even for a scientist such as myself who studies the interactions among species, climates, and the elements of life, to connect the invisible to the tangible when I flop onto the couch after a long day at the office or take a walk in the woods. It can be surprisingly difficult to think of oneself as a lump of inanimate matter as well as a person and, truth be told, I have yet to hear many scientists say that they really feel, in their heart of hearts, that they are made of atoms even though they may be able to discuss that fact in depth on an intellectual level. But I assure you that even a fleeting glimpse of this miraculous truth can change you forever, and for the better.

Although my own interest in atoms dates back to early childhood, I began a more transformative journey into atomic reality during the 1970s. I was a college student at the time, majoring in biology and geology, and I was struggling to reconcile my affection for the natural world with the seemingly sterile rigor that my science courses demanded of me. What I didn’t yet realize was that such rigor can be as necessary to tuning oneself in to the majesty of life as tedious daily practice is to an actor or musician.

I don’t remember who handed me the scrap of paper that contained an excerpt from The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, a Pulitzer Prize–winning drama written by the playwright and science teacher Paul Zindel in 1964. But I’ve never forgotten the effect that this fragment of the script had on me. In it, a high school student tells her sister what a teacher recently said to her. These words, I think it is safe to say, changed my life, and they can still produce a lump in my throat when I read them.

He told me to look at my hand, for a part of it came from a star that exploded too long ago to imagine…

When there was life, perhaps this part of me got lost in a fern that was crushed and covered until it was coal.

And then it was a diamond millions of years later—it must have been a diamond as beautiful as the star from which it had first come…

And he said this thing was so small—this part of me was so small it couldn’t be seen—but it was there from the beginning of the world.

And he called this bit of me an atom. And when he wrote the word, I fell in love with it.

Atom.

Atom.

What a beautiful word.