Breathing Atoms by the Billions

● Atoms are everywhere. Every material thing around you​—everything you can see, feel, touch, smell or taste—​is composed of tiny invisible atoms. This means that the very air you breathe is made up of these minute particles of matter. “Consider how many atoms there are in a breath of air,” wrote Heinz Haber in The Walt Disney Story of Our Friend the Atom. “Under normal conditions,” Haber continued, “a human being inhales and exhales about one pint of air with every breath. This means that about 16 times in every minute you are inhaling and exhaling no less than 25,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms!” So, on the average, you inhale no less than four hundred thousand billion billion atoms every minute of your life. That is a figure so big that you must add twenty-one zeros after the four hundred​—400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000! And how many atoms will a person breathe in a lifetime? Never mind trying to figure that one out. It’s bound to be an astronomical number so big that it runs off the end of your abacus. It’s mighty nice, then, that these atoms come in such tiny little packages.