The Universe Inside You

The DNA in human chromosome 1 is the largest molecule known, with around 10 billion atoms in it.

He even studied sections of cork. In these he saw an ‘infinite company of tiny boxes’ which he likened to the cells occupied by monks in a monastery. The biological cell is named after a monk’s bedroom

Underlying water’s importance is a unique collection of properties. It’s the only compound that exists as solid, liquid and gas at the typical temperatures we experience on the Earth’s surface

Ordinary stars don’t have enough energy to make the elements that are heavier than iron, but supernovas have so much oomph that they can create elements all the way up to uranium, the heaviest of the naturally occurring elements

There are so many atoms in a person (7 × 1027) that after a while, many of them will be recycled in other human beings. Your body contains atoms from kings and queens, noble warriors and court jesters

A condensate is a state of matter where the particles that make it up lose their individuality. This results in strange behaviours like superfluidity, where the substance has absolutely no resistance to movement

That temperature, unreachable in practice because quantum particles can never entirely stop, is absolute zero

A kilogram of antimatter, annihilating with an equivalent amount of matter, generates the equivalent of a typical power station running for around twelve years

Physicists have produced something called the ‘standard model’, which describes everything we know in existence being based on around nineteen different fundamental particles. Twelve of these are matter particles, like quarks and electrons, plus some more obscure variants found in nuclear reactions and collider experiments. Another five are special particles that carry forces. So, for instance, there’s the photon which is both a particle of light and carries electromagnetic force from place to place.

If you think about an electron whizzing around in an atom like a miniature planet, it would always be changing direction, always accelerating. And that means it would lose energy as a burst of light and would plunge into the nucleus in a tiny fraction of a second. Every atom in the universe would instantly self-destruct