Our Body and Atoms

The conversation between research assistant to a physics professor at the university and his girlfriend, her quest for knowledge.

From the novel Brida by Paulo Coelho

“Just look at that sky. What we’re looking at now is how the sky would have appeared thousands of years ago. Many of those stars have already died, and yet their light still fills the Universe. Other stars were born far away, and their light has not yet reached us.”

“So no one knows what the real sky looks like?”

“We don’t know. We study what we can see, but what we see is not always what exists.”

“What are we made of ? Where did the atoms that make up our bodies come from?”

“They were created along with these stars and this river. In the first second of the Universe’s existence.”

“So after that first moment of Creation, nothing more was added.”

“No, nothing. Everything moved and continues to move. Everything was transformed and continues to be transformed. But all the matter that exists in the Universe now is the same matter from all those billions of years ago, and not so much as a single atom has been added.”

It was easy to see the river flowing across the Earth, but it was hard to see the stars moving in the sky. And yet both were moving.

“Is it physically possible that the atoms that make up my body could have been in the body of someone who lived before me? Is such a thing possible?”

“They could be in plants or insects or they could have turned into helium molecules and be out there somewhere, millions of miles from Earth.”

“But is it possible that the atoms that made up the body of someone who died could be in my body and in someone else’s body?”

“Yes, it is.”