THE PARTICLE PHYSICS OF YOU

The average human being consists of about 7,000 trillion trillion atoms. About 99 percent of your body is made up of atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. You also contain much smaller amounts of the other elements that are essential for life. While most of the cells in your body regenerate every seven to fifteen years, many of the particles that make up those cells have already existed for millions of millenia. The hydrogen atoms in you were produced in the Big Bang, and the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms were made in burning stars. The very heavy elements in you were made in exploding stars. Scientists believe that almost all of your body's mass come from the kinetic energy of quarks and the binding energy of gluons. Our Sun is bombarding us with photons that dictate the way see the world around us. The Sun also releases an onslaught of particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are constant visitors in your body, zipping through at a rate of 100 trillion every second. Many neutrinos have been around since the first few seconds of the early universe, outdating even your own atoms. You also contain a small amount of antimatter. This happens when Potassium-40 decays, it releases a positron, the electron's antimatter twin. There's enough atoms in a human body to go around the Earth over 41 billion times. If we laid out all the atoms of all the people on Earth end-to-end, we would make a line long enough to go across the universe multiple times. If we lost all the empty space inside our atoms, we would be able to fit into a particle of a lead dust, and the entire human race would fit into a volume of a sugar cube. The next time your wondering how particle physics applies to your life, just take a look inside yourself.