mom's on the other side of the house. she opens up the oven. there's a pie in there. you got that almost right away. - how did you smell the pie? - atom. she opened the oven and what happened? atoms, these things migrating all the time. so atoms are constantly migrating from one place to the other. not only in air, in liquids, to some extent in solids. tiny, tiny extent in solids, but in liquids certainly. to give an example, go home. fill your bathtub high. take an eye dropper and take one drop of red ink, tiny drop. you see the redness in there, yeah? but you see it starts to spread out, right? that spreading out is evidenced that the atoms are doing what? they're moving, right? they're migrating. they go spread out, spread out. wait a little while, go out for a couple of hours, come on back, take an eye dropper, go in that bath, now you can't see the red, can you? it's all diluted, huh? you can't see it. take your eye dropper. see if you can find a place in that bathtub

that you can get a drop of water. bring that to the microscope and look at it and not have some pink in there, ink gonna do it, that's gonna spread out uniformly. you're not gonna get it. that ink will spread out everywhere. in the same way, if you drop that ink in the ocean of the earth, in the earth's ocean, it'd spread out too. when christopher columbus, coming across the atlantic ocean, okay, if he had taken a glass, like a 6-ounce glass that you drink water, yeah? he can reach down into the ocean and pick up that glass and then take that water and ththrow it back in, maybe tag it, maybe tag it, maybe make it all red or something, make it radioactive, somehow you can tell later on. today that glass of water all mixed up, long ago, yeah? go to the ocean, dip up, hold up to the light, it's somewhat like a little pink, because you know what? some of the atoms in christopher columbus's glass are in that glass of water.

there are so many atoms. oh, i'll just throw a little ddt in here. it'll be okay. what do the penguins say about that way, way, way in the bottom of the run? do they get the ddt? they get the ddt, honey. a visible amount of ddt is an enormous number of atoms. so it'll spread out. so you put a little pollution on the air, what happens? takes about six years for that to spread out. i want everyone to do something today. i want you all to do this. take a breath of air. no, you don't have to but go ahead. we take a breath of air, right? did it feel a little musty? do you know what you guys just did? you just breathed in billions and billions of atoms that once were exhaled by leonardo da vinci, the italian type.

take another breath. that one was einstein. einstein, okay. shakespeare. hey, but do this, that one on shakespeare, go again. now did the same atoms come out that went in? no, what come out are different than the ones that went in. why clorets, right? so every time we take a breath, you're breathing other people, and then when you breathe out, you're breathing out some of those people and you're also breathing the most important person in the whole universe and who's that? yourself. so some of your self is all around the atmosphere. you guys know that? now, let's do a little calculation. how many atoms are in your lungs at any moment with a normal-size breath? it turns out to be about 10 to the 22 atoms. that's one followed by 22 zeros,

10 to the 22 atoms in your lungs at any moment. get this, if you consider how many breathfuls of air are in the whole world, guess what the number turns out to be? 10 to the 22. 10 to the 22, so you know what that means, gang? there are as many breaths of air in the world as there are atoms in your lungs at any moment. how do we know how many breaths of air in the world? well, what you do is you calculate the area of the world. you guys know what the area of a ball the area of a sphere? anyone happen to know what the area of a ball is or square or any other shape? anyone happen to know what the area of a circle is? take an orange and cut it in half and you make a wet mark, right? that's a circle. what's the area of a circle? pi x r-squared, the area of a circle.

now let me tell you something you'll always remember. if you know the area of a circle pi x r-squared, you'll always remember what the area of a sphere is and the area of sphere is simply this. take an orange, cut it in half, how many times can you take that wet orange and wet the outside of another that's the same size. take a guess. could you wet the other one at least twice? would the area of a ball be twice that? see, take an orange. cut it in half. now that's a circle, right? and that area is pi x r-squared. what's the area, see this part here will wet this part here, right, that part will be wet and you wet it, it turns out you could wet that four times. so that means the area of a sphere equals 4 circles,

4 pi x r-squared. it's one way to look at it. anyway, one can calculate the area of the world because we know what the radius of the world is. we can get the area. we know how deep the atmosphere is. take the area, multiply by the depth of the atmosphere and it's an average depth and you get a number. you get a volume and that volume is 10 to the 22 times as big as the volume in your lungs. that's wild, because you know what that means, gang? i don't know if you guys can put this all together, but everyone do this... i go like this... now that particular breath, that breath, that breath if you exhaled, atoms, right? wait six years, go to the other side of the world, get with your friends and go... guess what you got in that one breath?

how many atoms in that breath you just guys let go, six years in the next one? begin with a "w". one, that's right, one. so you, 10 to 22 of your atoms and they're all gonna spread out out to 10 to 22 liters, really and every liter is gonna have one atom. so anywhere you go you pick up that one. so any one person's one breath, you guys got atoms in that breath right now. now, usually people take more than one breath. leonardo da vinci, honey, old dude, took many, many breaths, and all his breaths you have hundreds of billions of atoms of leonardo da vinci's breath in you or any other person who lived for a long time. so you're made up of the atoms of everyone who has ever breathed before you.

how many people in the world today? about 4.5 billion? that's 4.5 times 10 to the 9. how many people compared to how many atoms in your lungs, which is bigger? you know there's a lot of people. people are 10 to the 9, atoms are 10 to the 22. how many people have been on the planet since the beginning? nobody knows, but arthur c. clarke has made an estimation, and he said it this way. behind every human being stands 30 ghosts, that 1/30 of all human race from way back is walking the earth today. that number's changing quickly. let's say one trillionth, so that means there were 30 more people on the earth

from time zero than there are now. now there's about 4 billion. and there's 30 times that number for the total number of people that ever lived. 3 x 4 is 12, call this 100, that's like 10 to the 11, 10 to the 11 is 100 billion. so 100 billion people in the world. but the number of atoms in your lungs, 10 to the 22, what's that, billion, billion... 10,000 billion, billion atoms in your lungs. many, many, many more atoms in your lungs than people that ever lived, so you can rest assured that inside your lungs or inside your body at any moment are atoms from every human being who ever lived.

you know how the buddhists say things like we are all one. we are all one. what do the physic-ers think about statements like that? the hardcore physic-ers, what do they say? it's true. it's true. little kids know that we're all, if they're taking a science class, learn that we're all made of the same kind of atoms. you know, there's like 92 different kinds, right? no, but wait a minute. go a little further. we're not made of the same kind of atoms. honey, we're made of the exact same atoms over and over again. okay, trish, i see you scratching your forehead there. when you scratch your forehead, a little forehead atom go out, right? lee, you just went okay, you just got a little bit... now that will become part of your ear. so part of your ear today will be part of trish's forehead yesterday. and, you know, what we're doing, gang? we are literally breathing each other, because every time we breathe in-- sometimes the atom gets stuck, yeah? they get stuck and they become you. so you're really part of everyone else.

hey, someday, someday you get down and out. some day you get down and out. you may have one of those days when you don't feel like you're ever gonna amount to a darn thing? i tell you what you do. on those days you get down and out, grab onto yourself, grab on. say i might feel down, i might have the blues today but this, this that i'm holding onto, this is me, and this that i call me, that's atoms. and these atoms i'm holding on will live inside the bodies of everyone who's ever gonna be on this earth. 'cause that's what happens to you. your fate is to end up everyone else, true, false, or maybe? think about that. catch you later.

welcome to another session of beliefs and believers. i'm dr. john simmons, and we've been enjoying a delightful conversation about myth - the power of myth, the excitement of it - and while we're going to be asking judaism to help us further understand the mythic dimension today, i don't want to cut the conversation short, and we certainly did in the last class - we were down to the wire. so any comments or observations you might have? and again, we like to apply the things that we've seen