What scientific fact blows your mind the most?
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In chemistry I was taught one carbon atom can exist in at least 12 separate living bodies before it's no longer stable.
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What does that mean?
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After you die, the carbon atoms that made you might go on to make another living thing.
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that doesn't make any sense. Carbon doesn't get less stable by being used in bodies.
Carbon 14 exists, but that decays regardless if it's in a body or not. At has quite a long half life
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At least is a heavy lifting qualifier in this case.
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Hon I think you maybe misunderstood your chem class.
Carbon is carbon is carbon and doesn't know or care if it's in a living body.
Carbon-14 has a half life of 5700 years. This means that through random decay, the approximate rate of decay is one half of a given amount every 5700 years, this of course breaks down when you reach the single-digit quantities of atoms.
Now, this has nothing to do with the stability of an atom of regular-ass carbon-12, your common garden variety carbon, which is extremely stable and would require outside influence to decay into another isotope.
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I mean... You're not exactly wrong.
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I remember reading a couple years ago that's not actually how plane wings work. The actual way is much more complicated and hard to explain and hard to teach, so they just teach it this way because its an intuitive mental model that is "close enough" and "seems right", and it really doesn't matter unless you're a plane wing designer.
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Yea, I misremembered it. It was in my book from a while back. Here we go:
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What I find mind blowing about the scale of the universe, is that on a logarithmic scale from the smallest possible thing to the largest possible thing, humans live at almost the exact centre.
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When you say "All the atoms and molecules are still in the same places", I can't say I agree. It is the change of chemical composition that renders our body dead. Or should I say, death is defined to be such a chemical composition.
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Just like my codebase.
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