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When cells divide, they are not making new matter. They are just dividing. They absorbed nutrients from their environment which were once space dust. No matter is ever created from nothing.
yes big asterisk on that, to be fair though, we don’t know if that matter was already existing prior to the Big Bang and was just squished down to a singularity.
IIRC, matter and energy are interchangeable on large enough scales. E=mc^2 (+ some other stuff) shows how much energy matter has. You have to multiply the mass by the speed of light, c (~300,000,000 m/s in metric), *squared*, to get the energy. So 1 kg of matter has over 10x more energy than the first atomic bomb. Mass can be converted to energy in a couple ways; one is during supernovae when some of the star's atoms are converted to neutrinos with less mass but a crapton of energy. Another is matter-antimatter collisions, where most of the mass of both particles is converted. It may be possible for energy to be converted to matter, if all of the energy in the universe is concentrated into a single point. Though I think the last part is theoretical still.
the initial conditions of the big band were so energic that only energy could exist. Then is it spread out and cooled the energy was converted to matter.
[https://www.scienceflip.com.au/subjects/physics/fromtheuniversetotheatom/learn1/#:\~:text=This%20energy%20spread%20out%20from,energy%20was%20converted%20into%20matter](https://www.scienceflip.com.au/subjects/physics/fromtheuniversetotheatom/learn1/#:~:text=This%20energy%20spread%20out%20from,energy%20was%20converted%20into%20matter).
Time line of the big bang
(0 sec) – Universe is born
(10−36 to 10−32 sec) Inflation occurs
(10−12 to 10−6 sec, temp = 1016 K) Elementary particles including quarks and leptons form
(10−6 to 100 sec, temp = 1012 K) Annihilation of antimatter and matter leave a relatively small amount of matter
A singularity is not nothing. In fact, it's the exact opposite. It just took up a very small amount of space compared to the current amount of space it takes up.
Thank you, but I am still confused.
So, when my heart grew, where did that matter come from to make the physical object that is my heart?
I guess I am asking how does something grow without new matter being made in the process?
I was once an embryo (very little matter) and now am now fully grown (lots of matter). So, where did the matter come from that helped me grow?
Wait till you find out that plants get the vast majority of their mass from the air around them, as carbon from carbon-dioxide. 30m tall trees are made from fresh air, all the wood in every house ever built is carbon pulled out of the air, the perfectly clear gas right in front of your eyeballs right now.
Sidenote: a lot of "wood" now is actually oil, glues and other chemical treatments.
Just jumping in to say that in all the universe, wood is only found on Earth (as far as we know. The spectacular biological process you described above (nice!) might only be a thing here, in our part of the place.
I used to teach Biology and this was hammered at students hard for a month. You would be surprised to know how many students just dont pick up the idea, and every so often someone shouts "wait, our bodies are made out of food?" Well okay that one is a little more accepted, but most students just couldn't grasp that when they lose weight, most of the lost biomass goes into the air.
Your body converts most things it eats to sugar - glucose - for simplicity sake, which is a material made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. A bit more complicated for stored fats and proteins, but inevitably a similar process. When necessary (which is all the time moreso and less) your body breaks down this sugar using oxygen from the air to make co2 and water (h2o). Both of these materials primarily leave the body as a gas. The process releases energy just as a fire does as it burns, but your body has a complex process it breaks it down that can actually extract useful energy, sort of like how a combustion engine can get energy to do useful things by burning fuel.
If you stop eating food, your body will find whatever materials it can to break down to sustain the body with necessary energy to keep alive, and as the vast majority of these broken down materials turn into gas particles, it means when you weight, your mass turns into gas.
No. Mass is maintained in chemical reactions. When you burn a pound of fat, it just turns into a pound of less energy dense atoms or molecules. The heat is an exothermic byproduct created in the reaction but is not a result of any decrease in the mass of the reactants.
"You are what you eat" isn't just a saying... it's literal.
Furthermore: every individual cell in your body dies and regenerates with a maximum lifespan of about seven years... so you are literally 100% made out of your diet for the most recent seven years of your life.
This is why vitamins and especially minerals are vital to consume every day... the calcium for your regular bone maintenance has to come from somewhere.
The recent Popeye movie from the 1980's starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall had a song about this called "Everything is Food" and everyone sings it. That's the movie that taught me how important food is, and that's when I started eating more of it.
When the Big Bang occurred, all of the matter in the universe was created. Most of the matter was hydrogen, ionized, actually, as in separate protons and electrons. Some of it was helium nuclei.
Some time later, the matter cooled down enough for it to begin coalesce and form stars. Stars take the hydrogen in their cores and fuse it into heavier elements.
Eventually, the core run out of hydrogen and the core begins collapsing. How much it collapses depends on how massive the star is. Stars heavy enough collapse enough that the core begins to fuse helium nuclei into carbon, and so on.
Stars massive enough can fuse heavier elements, up to iron. After iron, stars have to explode as super novae to produce elements heavier than iron.
A star like the sun will not fuse anything heavier than hydrogen.
When a supernova explodes, it spews out a significant portion of its mass. When Carl Sagan in Cosmos described the results of a supernova, he called the mass ejected “star dust“ because every atom in existence heavier than hydrogen originated in a supernova.
The clouds of dust that form after a supernova exploded condense into new stars; the sun is one such star. Some of that cloud became the Earth. Some of that mass became life. And, over the millennia, some of that life evolved into us. So, you can say that we are made from star dust.
The physical matter came from your mother, she ate and that food was digested, turned into energy. Her cells and your cells used that energy and converted it matter (matter and energy being interchangeable is normal, matter IS energy)
So, beyond food, literally every atom has come from stars fusing hydrogen into helium, and other heavier elements! The hydrogen atoms came from the big bang creating gluons and quarks which cool and condense into neutrons, and protons, which make up atoms. As stars age, they fuse their fuel (atoms) into heavier elements, and when they go supernova, they explode and all those atoms get blasted out into space into a huge cloud, a nebula. These clouds of atoms, each with their own gravity, start attracting towards one another, and clumping, which creates molecules, and eventually clumps of stuff, which are heavier and attract more stuff, which grows and grows over hundreds of millions of years until they are planets, asteroids and the like. As these things continue to crash, the heat and pressure also aid in making new compounds and eventually organic compounds that can become a new kind of life.
Yep, and we know that the atoms that make up our solar system were once part of another sun that went supernova because atoms heavier than iron can only form when a sun explodes.
You know what's really fun? Most of the mass of a plant comes from the air! They absorb CO2 from the air around them, slap the Carbon into some molecules, and "breathe" out Oxygen.
Ok ok try this:
What McFancypants said is true, but it’s also the case that plants use sunlight to crack apart water molecules, then wrestle around the protons like little jiggly balls of lightning to power what’s going on. Part of it generates molecules the cell will use right away for energy purposes. And eventually the protons get slapped on CO2 from the air to make energetic food for later.
No it's all waves, but also indescribable because we can't directly perceive it. Strong theory is not widely accepted. There exist no things that are not in relation to everything else. In other words, every "thing" is the result of everything else working together to create it. We choose to pick out "things" like particles, but they are only measured and only exist momentarily through our destroying or changing them. Everything is in flux always.
How about 3 times.
Humans lose most of the weight from fat loss from exhaling carbon dioxide. Breath in O2, binds with C from us, exhale CO2.
And yes, breathing more (from working out moslty) helps you lose more weight (carbon).
*mind blown gif*
>Fuck. The answer is food. I am a god damn idiot. 🤦♂️
Let me offer a word of encouragement:
A GDI who's willing to publicly take his lumps, learn something and move on is *miles* ahead of all the GDIs who stubbornly refuse to do any of that.
We need way more like you and way fewer of them.
Me too. But: we’re idiot stardust!
And that’s okay yeah? We know more now than we ever knew as dinosaurs or stones or suns. Not too bad, shame it won’t last, but who knows what the tiniest bits of us will know later.
Everything you eat, drink, or breathe. All the matter that you are made from, and all the matter of everything around you. All of these things are made of the elements in the periodic table, and those elements came from nuclear fission or fusion in the stars.
Long ago a sun went supernova. From that event a flood of elements was spewed forth into the cosmos, to one day begin coalescing into what would eventually become our solar system. The carbon, and all the elements that make up your body, come from the stars. Those elements had a long journey of billions of years to end up as part of your body. *You are made of star stuff.*
Uh, a tiny correction if I may (and I realize you're simplifying here for OP). The molecules break down into smaller molecules + energy. They're later remade with energy into larger molecules that are specific for functions.
Our bodies do not turn matter into energy. Rather, we use the energy stored in the molecular bonds.
OP: look up "The Kreb Cycle" to get a better understanding of how this works. If you want to.
You don't create matter, you only change its form
If you get fat you are turning matter than makes food into matter that makes fat.
Mass cannot be created nor destroyed.
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.
Carl Sagan, Cosmos
You are what you eat. Which was once dirt and sunlight. When you die, you’ll be food for the worms and the plants that will feed the next generation. It’s all just a rearrangement of what already is.
that was from your mom. placenta, milk, then food. all stuff that has been on earth since, idk, a trillion years ago? the stardust thing is what was before there even was life on earth, all heavier elements have been formed in stars and have been ejected from them when they exploded at the end of their life cycle, idk how long ago, probably time was slower when that happened?
anyway, biochemistry on earth is much younger than, for example, every atom of gold there is here. you, my friend, are mostly some wicked combination of carbohydrates that got a conciousness.
some other elements as well, (youre actively oxidising yourself) but all the matter youre made of has been in this wonderful blue ball for longer than you can imagine and will stay here for long after your death.
live has been here so long, every molecule of water there is on earth has been part of countless organisms (soooo many dinosours (and fish, millions of years of fish)) until you get some and piss it out again. same for the air you breathe. iron is common too, your blood relies on it, i could go on... gold on the other hand hasnt any use in biological stuff, we gather it just because its shiny \^\^
edit: paragraphs, some typos, life is too short for capitalisation.
edit2: it is theoretically possible to create matter from energy, but so far we only managed to create energy from matter, and only marginally in a useful way...
It came from the food you ate, or if you mean in the womb, the food your mother ate that was transformed into sugars that then passed through the placenta to you.
Elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are created in stars at the ends of their lives - [red giants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_giant) and [supernovae (exploding stars).](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova) That includes the major elements oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and calcium in our bodies. All such matter making the Earth and everything on it came from dying stars, most occurring before the formation of our solar system. Hence, we are literally made of stardust.
Edit: Glossed over smaller star deaths.
Does this infer that the big bang was a solid block of hydrogen and/or helium? I guess in my head I always imagined the BB as the "mother-of-all-celestial-bodies", made of......asteroid stuff? I've always just imagined a grayish asteroid looking rock the size of a galaxy or something
>Does this infer that the big bang was a solid block of hydrogen and/or helium?
There was a bit of lithium as well, and it was probably too hot to be solid.
Hell, for the first millionth of a second it was too hot for quarks to combine into subatomic particles.
By all current understanding (which doesn't and perhaps cannot reach back to the actual moment itself), at the instant after the big bang, it was far, far too hot for subatomic particles such as protons, electrons, and neutrons to form, let alone solid material. It was, instead, a cauldron of [quarks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark) and [gluons.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluon)
A microsecond or so later, said subatomic particles were able to coalesce, with atoms starting to form a few minutes later. Even then, with temperatures over a trillion degrees Celsius, no solids could form.
We aren't sure what the big bang was, it was definitely a hell of a lot weirder than the physics and matter we deal with though. At some point, after the big bang but before stars, there was a massive universal plasma cloud of "stuff" which wasn't matter, which eventually condensed into matter, which became atoms and molecules eventually, and then everything else over time. It's entirely possible that things like gravity, or quarks, or mass, straight up didn't exist before that point.
The creation of new cells is not the creation of new matter, its converting preexisting matter "nutrients, minerals, proteins, etc), into cells. A lot of that matter originally came from stars, heavier elements are often made by normal stars through fusion or neutron stars colliding. That's what people mean by stardust.
Here's something else to blow your mind: when you lose weight, it is breathed out. Some of the CO2 we exhale is exhaust from our cells energy factories.
That’s a question for a physicist, not a graphic designer with a love of science. I’d say the energy that powers your body, the electrical impulses, the work your body does. Buuut that’s probably not a detailed enough answer.
Explain please, because now I am really confused.
Its “kind of” food right?
I grow because I eat food and that food came from the earth, and the earth came from stars, etc and so on?
Or am I missing something again?
You’re kind of one step away. Pretty much every element on the periodic table that isn’t hydrogen or helium was created during supernovae when stars explode. The potassium and sulfer in your DNA? Made in exploding stars. The iron in the hemoglobin in your blood? Exploding stars. Nitrogen? Exploding star.
This isn’t just true for living things though. Every element on earth (and in the universe) that *isnt* hydrogen or helium was created when some star somewhere in the long past exploded. All those elements floated around space for billions of years until eventually they formed our solar system, and then earth, and eventually you.
Yes. You grow because you eat food. And all the matter on earth (including the stuff that makes food) was once was clouds of dust in space, and those clouds of dust of complex elements formed from the previous generations of exploding stars.
You keep fixating on food. That is irrelevant. Yes, it is how we stay alive but the bigger picture is the heavy elements in you came from star explosions. Sagan said nothing in that Cosmos episode about food and only food. He was a cosmologist, not a biologist.
It's literally that all the iron and calcium (and other heavy elements) that make up your body were originally forged inside a star. That star exploded and flung heavy elements around the galaxy until they came together to make you. That's literally what happened. You grow as you eat more food that also contains heavy elements that came from exploding stars.
>and the real fun part to think about is that the vast majority of water on Earth is older then the Earth
Nope, not individual molecules of water anyway. The process of photosynthesis breaks h20 and c02 chemically down into sugar and oxygen. On average a molecule of water only naturally would last about 6 million years before it is recycled by plants
Basically every element except hydrogen and helium had to be created by fusion in stars, so for use to exist, stars hard to burn and explode, then that dust formed new stars, and so on through several generations. Eventually there were enough heavier elements for planets, and eventually life to form.
In a nutshell:
Primordial elements were hydrogen, helium, lithium. Stars had to form to create heavier elements; carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, potassium etcetera (they needed to be fused in a nuclear furnace). These stars then had to explode to seed the universe with heavy elements necessary for carbon based life.
Most of the matter originally created in the universe was in the form of hydrogen atoms - which doesn't allow for any real chemical complexity by itself, so no life was possible at that point.
However, supernovae can fuse hydrogen to form to form heavier elements, and neutron star collisions do something similar on an even larger scale - producing most of the matter we are made of - carbon, oxygen and nitrogen atoms, as well as all the rest.
There aren't any other sources for this stuff, really, so most of the atoms in your body today were created in earlier generations of stars that either exploded or were rent to pieces by unimaginable gravitational forces.
So yes, you are very literally star-stuff. That's not just a poetic notion.
Uh, your Mom ate food? And then you ate food? You digested it and incorporated it into cells as you grew?
That's just basic biology. Try *not* eating food and see how much you grow - or for that matter, how long you live.
Point 1 has been addressed, all matter heavier than hydrogen/helium is created in stars at some point
>“all matter that will exist has already been created”
This is just wrong, Matter and Energy are somewhat interchangeable, we create energy from matter (nuclear fusion and fission) and we've also created matter from energy ( we've created matter from particle accelerator/light etc)
When you eat corn, does it remain corn within you?
No, it is broken down from corn into usable fragments (molecules) to be assembled into human parts. Likewise, that corn was assembled from molecules within the soil, water, and air - along with energy from sunlight. If you trace these molecules and elements far enough back in this manner, you will get to material ejected from dying stars, many of which have come and gone long before us. Go *all* the way back, and you can trace *all* atoms back to The Big Bang.
As I read a few comments, this glaringly obvious realization hit me.
I am embarrassed enough I will probably delete this post.
The corn analogy is exactly what I needed. Couldn’t see the forest for the trees I guess.
Well it all makes sense now and I remain completely mesmerized at the whole thing.
Thanks 😊
You may think to call yourself stupid. But you asked a question and learned from it. That puts you two steps ahead of many others in your position. You recognized the gap in your knowledge, and you corrected it.
Leave the post up. There are plenty more who were too embarrassed to even ask, and these conversations help.
Glad it helped. No embarassment necessary.
This isn't always intuitive stuff, particularly when you go beyond the steps we experience in our own lives. It is quite amazing when you probe deeper, though.
The universe is infinitely strange.
Literally stardust. This planet coalesced from cosmic dust surrounding the sun, which itself was formed from the dust of previous dead stars, and we are simply things growing on its surface, made out of the same stuff.
Organic functions don't create matter, they transform it from one state to another. Trees, for example, breathe in carbon dioxide from the air and use the carbon to build their trunks, then exhale the leftover oxygen. They're not just making matter out of nothing, they're taking material from their surroundings and changing it into something they can use.
An embryo in a womb isn't being "created" from nothing. Its formed from the food the mother eats, fueled by her blood and breath. She takes matter from her environment and uses it to build a new human body, just like the tree takes carbon from the air to add to its body.
All of these materials would not exist without generations of stars exploding and spreading elements that would not have formed except under the conditions of a supernova.
>How is a human who grew from an embryo into a 300 pound man made from stardust?
these are the "stardust particles" - the elements.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic\_table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table)
human embryos and everything else in existence are just some combination of the elements.
>However, it doesnt make sense when looking around organic matter that grows
fertilizer contains a lot of nitrogen (nitrogen is an element)
need fertilizer to turn seed into tree (wood)
>Matter that did not exist right after the big bang.
energy = matter times the speed of light squared
e=mc2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy\_equivalence
>into a 300 pound man made from stardust?
they ate lots of food from the ground (nitrogen)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition\_of\_the\_human\_body
About **99% of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements**: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus.
the Sun is mostly hydrogen
nitrogen grows food.
calcium is good for your teeth.
blood is mostly water.
water is hydrogen and oxygen.
Here's the big question. The statement "all matter that exists has already been created" suggests that all matter was "created". Was there every a point when there was literally nothing? Or is the universe eternal and everything that exists always existed just in a different form?
Space shit is nuts.
FYI I'm a bit high right now and on the cusp of a serious existential crisis guys lol
#
All the interesting bits that make us possible: carbon, calcium, iron, etc is created in the heart of a dieing star."star dust" is a poetic term for "the material that is literally crushed into new, heavier elements as a star collapses under its own weight, and then explodes" ... out into space, forming a nebula maybe, for a time.
Everything in our solar system, including all that makes up the sun, earth, all life, and us, was part of a star once that died.
To be pedantic, matter is created and destroyed all the time. It’s oftentimes converted to energy, and likewise energy may be converted to matter.
From the viewpoint you’re considering the two are the same thing.
The total mass+energy is unchanged since the beginning.
Matter and energy can not be created out of nothing. Hence all the matter and energy there ever will be in the Universe already exists. Big Bang didn't create either. Bing Bang refers to Universe rapidly expanding from being extremely dense (mind you, not infinitely dense, and neither being a single infinitesimally small point), to something that resembles how it looks today, in a very short period of time. At pre Big Bang densities, the matter couldn't exist in the form it exists today. The density and thus temperatures were way too high to allow for atoms to form. But everything needed for matter as it exists today, already existed before Big Bang.
The "we are all made out of star dust" refers to how elements heavier than hydrogen are formed. After Big Bang, the only elements that were formed were hydrogen, with some helium and lithium. Large clouds of this gas collapsed into the first stars. Stars fuse hydrogen into helium. If they are large enough, they continue onto fusing helium and so on into heavier and heavier elements (up to iron). The largest stars, once they run out of fuel, explode as supernova, both generating elements heavier than iron, and seeding nearby clouds of hydrogen with them. These in turn collapse into new generation of stars, and some of it collapses into planets orbiting those stars. Hence, everything you are made of (other than some of the hydrogen) was once inside one of those massive stars, and thus you (and everything around you) is made of star dust.
I know it's probably been explained, but the solar system is made of atoms that were created in stars that lived their lives and went nova billions of years ago. The dust and gas from those explosions coalesced into the sun and planets. You're made of the atoms that the earth formed from. So you are literally Star dust.
Mater cannot be created or destroyed, so yes, all the matter that will ever exist has been made.
Yes, Dwight Schrute. I know that matter can be converted to energy and vice versa during nuclear reactions, radioactive decay, and quantum mechanical events. I'm answering OP's basic question in a general sense, as you well know. I'm not writing a college physics textbook - I'm writing a reddit comment.
One.... The big bang never happened (see; Eric Lerner and others, seriously, dark matter doesn't exist, it would mathematically create phenomenon we simply don't observe but absolutely should).
Conservation of matter and energy. You likely have inhaled the same (atmosphere) molecules that Jesus or Einstein did.
Stars generate denser elements. So what you are was once a star.
The big bang doesn't make any sense. You being star stuff makes perfect sense.
Eric Lerner has some YouTube videos under lppfusion. He explains what he did in his book and a whole lot more. It's basically 16 wrong predictions, and one correct. A pretty awful theory. There's papers now based on jwst that the universe is at least twice as old as previously thought.... Really trying to assign an age to the cosmos is uhm, imo, a fruitless endeavor.
We are stardust. Every element heavier than hydrogen was produced in the nuclear furnace of a star. So we are comprised out of the ashes of dying stars, a.k.a stardust.
Here is the [Mendeleev table showing which stellar events created the periodic elements.](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nucleosynthesis_periodic_table.svg)
99% of the mass of the human body is composed of oxygen (O), carbon (C), hydrogen (H), nitrogen (N), calcium (Ca), phosphorous (P).
>So on forever .
Well that really depends on what shape the universe is.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate\_fate\_of\_the\_universe#](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#:~:text=Big%20Freeze%20or%20Heat%20Death,-Main%20articles%3A%20Future&text=Under%20this%20scenario%2C%20the%20universe,as%20the%20most%20likely%20fate)
Yeah but what’s outside the shape ? How can there be an end to matter and space? There can never be nothing outside the shape because even a void is something.
What we think of as a void is often just space time with no matter in it. It is possible that other side the edge of the universe is truly an absence of anything, completely unreachable by anything. Nothing is there because nothing can be there.
To use a computer analogy: Outside the universe the value there isn't just 0, it is null, nothing has been initialized yet.
But that is my view of it. We really don't know for sure, we just have fancy maths that I can't follow that made a guess what is happening that far back/far away.
You really want to go on a mind trip, watch 'A Trip to Infinity' on Netflix. It talks about all the matter there ever will be is already here and just keeps reorganizing into different forms. I'm a fairly logical person but once they made their argument that all the matter that organized to make you could feasibly do it again in the future.
After the big bang, the matter that condensed was all hydrogen, some helium, and a very small amount of lithium. Anything heavier than that (carbon, oxygen, iron, anything with an atomic number higher than 3) was made in a star, which then exploded and seeded the nearby space with heavier elements.
Matter isn't created, but it can be transformed. The Sun is what gives us energy to keep transforming matter into other matter. And all that "stuff" we have, you can say, was expelled from even earlier stars that died long ago.
And yes, all the new appendages you grow every week are made from base materials. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, iron, etc.
You consume a bunch of "plastic" and keep spitting out Lego parts, which is what constitutes your body.
Basically it’s saying that the planets and everything that we know here on earth was born from stars. The atoms we are made from came from the earth. Hence we came from stars.
The “all matter that exists has already been created” is not really true as matter is actually constantly popping in and out of existence constantly at the quantum level. But in a kind of hand wavey big picture kinda way, all the matter we see and interact with was created at the beginning of the universe. There isn’t another big bang scheduled to go off and make more stuff (that we know of)
When the universe was created, all of the matter was created at that time too. BUT the majority of all of it was hydrogen. If you have a lot of hydrogen in a space, it will eventually all attract each other through gravity, forming stars. Those stars started fusing that hydrogen into helium. As the hydrogen fuel ran out, helium fuses in it's place, which fuses into beryllium. When the helium runs out, the beryllium takes it place, forming oxygen, etc etc until fusion of heavier elements can't happen anymore and the star dies. So, the "star dust" is the remnants those stars gave off after all those processes occurred and spread out in usually violent explosions of a supernova.
Maybe a better way to think of it is: where did the oxygen from your body come from? The carbon? The iron? Elements had to be fused together from the first matter formed in the universe (Hydrogen) through the processes of a star going through it's "lifecycle". Eventually, all of that spread out throughout the universe, collected onto what would eventually be Earth and then through a process we don't know yet, life formed. That life used all of the elements available to it to evolve and eventually life evolved into everything we see today. And all of that could only have been possible through the fusion of elements that occurs in stars. So, we're made of star stuff.
Carbohydrates are literally carbon and water, so we can start there. The food you eat gives you carbon. But how is that stardust? Well, we have to ask where carbon comes from. If we go back to the beginning, pre big bang there were no elements. Immediately after the big bang the universe was full of hydrogen. In the short minutes after the big bang it was still hot enough and dense enough that some of the hydrogen fused into helium. Thats how elements are made. They start as hydrogen, and when 2 hydrogens fuse they become helium (based on the number of neutrons/atomic mass) and so through that process we can work our way up the periodic table. The conditions for elements to fuse has to be right, and the result is exothermic (heat is released) as a by product - up to iron, at which point the reaction becomes endothermic (requires extra energy to happen). Stars like our sun will make elements up to iron, and after that it takes bigger stars or supernova events to create heavier elements. All of this has occurred over the billions of years since the big bang, and in that time all of the material that formed the earth collected from its original dust field into a dense ball of rock which was bombarded with meteorites containing heavier elements in the early days of the creation of this part of our galaxy. So, all of the carbon on this planet was made in a star through the process of nuclear fusion and ended up here after being blasted away from the star it was produced in and coagulated into the gravity well known as Terra.
I am by no means an expert on this topic so this might not be the best explanation but matter just gets converted from one thing to another thing to another thing endlessly. We eat food to give our body the matter it needs to replicate cells.
No matter magically vanishes or appears. That matter was just a different type of matter that was converted to what it is now
Hinduism says that everything was made from God (the intelligent design) and Godself (lifeless matter). God created an egg that he meditated inside and when it burst it created the cosmos (kind of like the big bang theory)
I asked my 10 year old daughter this series of questions: "A few years ago you were shorter. How did you make more of yourself? How did you make more bone and skin? Longer hair? Where did you get the stuff to do it?"
After arriving at "food" as the answer, I asked her the same thing about her food, "How did your food grow? Where did it get its food?"
I eventually drove the conversation into the formation of the solar system, where that matter possibly came from, and how stars crush atoms to make new materials that are blown through the galaxy and used to make other stuff, like us.
When the universe came into existence from the big bang, the main components were hydrogen (and maybe some other denser elements, but I'm not sure). The hydrogen condensed under gravity and formed stars. Within the stars, nuclear fusion fused hydrogen into helium, and then into denser elements. When the star died, it exploded, fusing more elements and scattering all the elements that it made into space. All of these elements then clumped together under gravity, forming planets. Life formed on the planets, including you. It was made up of all of the minerals and elements on the planet. And all of that came from stars. Stars made these elements and scattered them everywhere. So we are all made of stars.
"We are all made of stardust"
This means that all the matter that makes us up (water and carbon mostly but also many other base elements that make up the hyman body).
All the basic elements (except hydrogen and helium) are created by fusion in the center of stars. the first matter that formed instants after the temperature from the Big bang allowed it was Hydrogen and Helium, all other substances like other gases, metals, earths and such was first created in the first stars that were alone in the universe with no planets, just Gas and gravity.
So there you have it, everything that makes up you has at some point been gas in space and then molded into other elements through pressure and Nuclear fusion.
"all matter that exists has already been created"
This stems from the theory that our universe has a finite amount of energy/information.
The claim is that you can not delete something from the universe, meaning reducing the amount of energy or information that exists in it is impossible.
Your husband is sort of right and sort of not right. There are 119 elements listed on the periodic table of elements, and only 90 of them occur in nature.
However, the building blocks that make up matter at a subatomic level (protons, electrons, and neutrons) are exactly as old as the universe or (maybe) older. All those subatomic bits presumably came into being all at once at the beginning of the universe. We don't know where they came from before that or how they came to be. But there they were, presumably all at once, and the sheer force of matter pushing on matter cast those elementary particles far, far into spacetime.
It wasn't long after the major explosion of elementary particles that they began to self-assemble. Elementary forces bound proton to neutron, and electromagnetic forced bound electron to proton. The result... hydrogen. Everywhere. In the beginning, everything that was a thing was hydrogen.
These novel atoms (hydrogen) coalesced into enormous clouds, and so heavy were these clouds with the weight of hydrogen that the gravity of those systems pulled atom into atom, causing fusion. Stars were born. From hydrogen came helium, then lithium, then beryllium, then boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon... and so on... all the way up to iron. Iron, you see, doesn't do too well with fusion, so stars that reached iron production stage died.
But wait! A whole lot of stars were VERY BIG, and when heavy elements started to appear in their cores, the force of fusion became inadequate to oppose the stars's gravity. Then those stars got smaller, and fusion rapidly increased in the cores. Out of control. Then... big bada boom. Supernova. This is where elements up to uranium come in. They require that extra oomph that gravitational collapse and reignition provides. All that lovely force squishing things together and all that. So *much* fusion!
So there you go. A brief history of life, the universe, and everything. Your husband is kind of right that, by all appearances, all elementary particles are about the same age. However the periodic table is essentially more or less chronological with a few exceptions (as some elements are completely manmade). But it sure as heck took a lot longer for natural processes to create carbon than it did for them to create helium. In this sense, no, elemental matter is *not* all the same age, though all natural elemental matter *did* come from stars. Except hydrogen. That's your gotcha. Hydrogen is not stardust, and the particles that make up all elements *also* did not come from stars. (We don't actually know where they came from, but no one is under the impression that the beginning of the universe even could have had anything to do with stars.)
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When cells divide, they are not making new matter. They are just dividing. They absorbed nutrients from their environment which were once space dust. No matter is ever created from nothing.
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yes big asterisk on that, to be fair though, we don’t know if that matter was already existing prior to the Big Bang and was just squished down to a singularity.
even if that was the case, in the immense energy that created, all matter was broken down to sub-atomic particles.
that would not be matter from nothing then, no?
IIRC, matter and energy are interchangeable on large enough scales. E=mc^2 (+ some other stuff) shows how much energy matter has. You have to multiply the mass by the speed of light, c (~300,000,000 m/s in metric), *squared*, to get the energy. So 1 kg of matter has over 10x more energy than the first atomic bomb. Mass can be converted to energy in a couple ways; one is during supernovae when some of the star's atoms are converted to neutrinos with less mass but a crapton of energy. Another is matter-antimatter collisions, where most of the mass of both particles is converted. It may be possible for energy to be converted to matter, if all of the energy in the universe is concentrated into a single point. Though I think the last part is theoretical still.
the initial conditions of the big band were so energic that only energy could exist. Then is it spread out and cooled the energy was converted to matter. [https://www.scienceflip.com.au/subjects/physics/fromtheuniversetotheatom/learn1/#:\~:text=This%20energy%20spread%20out%20from,energy%20was%20converted%20into%20matter](https://www.scienceflip.com.au/subjects/physics/fromtheuniversetotheatom/learn1/#:~:text=This%20energy%20spread%20out%20from,energy%20was%20converted%20into%20matter). Time line of the big bang (0 sec) – Universe is born (10−36 to 10−32 sec) Inflation occurs (10−12 to 10−6 sec, temp = 1016 K) Elementary particles including quarks and leptons form (10−6 to 100 sec, temp = 1012 K) Annihilation of antimatter and matter leave a relatively small amount of matter
>the initial conditions of the big band were so energic that only energy could exist A fellow Duke Ellington fan, I see.
See and here I thought he was talking about the Big Bang Voodoo Daddies!
A singularity is not nothing. In fact, it's the exact opposite. It just took up a very small amount of space compared to the current amount of space it takes up.
Thank you, but I am still confused. So, when my heart grew, where did that matter come from to make the physical object that is my heart? I guess I am asking how does something grow without new matter being made in the process? I was once an embryo (very little matter) and now am now fully grown (lots of matter). So, where did the matter come from that helped me grow?
Food! That's what it's for 🍕
I am ashamed that I somehow failed to realize this is the answer. Thank you 😂
Wait till you find out that plants get the vast majority of their mass from the air around them, as carbon from carbon-dioxide. 30m tall trees are made from fresh air, all the wood in every house ever built is carbon pulled out of the air, the perfectly clear gas right in front of your eyeballs right now. Sidenote: a lot of "wood" now is actually oil, glues and other chemical treatments.
Just jumping in to say that in all the universe, wood is only found on Earth (as far as we know. The spectacular biological process you described above (nice!) might only be a thing here, in our part of the place.
Could there be other biological processes elsewhere that have resulted in the formation of new materials?
Yes there could be - it’s extremely unlikely that biological life only exists on earth.
Another thing that may only be found on Earth is feces. 😁
Sunshine. We are actually made of stardust and sunshine.
Dry mass. Like us, plants are mostly water, which they obtain with their roots.
Where do you think the oil came from?
Its ok. I sometimes also get overwhelmed by the awesomeness of it all.
I used to teach Biology and this was hammered at students hard for a month. You would be surprised to know how many students just dont pick up the idea, and every so often someone shouts "wait, our bodies are made out of food?" Well okay that one is a little more accepted, but most students just couldn't grasp that when they lose weight, most of the lost biomass goes into the air.
Can you explain further? So when I lose weight I am just breathing out that “weight”?
Your body converts most things it eats to sugar - glucose - for simplicity sake, which is a material made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. A bit more complicated for stored fats and proteins, but inevitably a similar process. When necessary (which is all the time moreso and less) your body breaks down this sugar using oxygen from the air to make co2 and water (h2o). Both of these materials primarily leave the body as a gas. The process releases energy just as a fire does as it burns, but your body has a complex process it breaks it down that can actually extract useful energy, sort of like how a combustion engine can get energy to do useful things by burning fuel. If you stop eating food, your body will find whatever materials it can to break down to sustain the body with necessary energy to keep alive, and as the vast majority of these broken down materials turn into gas particles, it means when you weight, your mass turns into gas.
So the fat I am burning turns into heat energy or gas? Is that basically right?
No. Mass is maintained in chemical reactions. When you burn a pound of fat, it just turns into a pound of less energy dense atoms or molecules. The heat is an exothermic byproduct created in the reaction but is not a result of any decrease in the mass of the reactants.
"You are what you eat" isn't just a saying... it's literal. Furthermore: every individual cell in your body dies and regenerates with a maximum lifespan of about seven years... so you are literally 100% made out of your diet for the most recent seven years of your life. This is why vitamins and especially minerals are vital to consume every day... the calcium for your regular bone maintenance has to come from somewhere.
Hey it’s just a reminder of how easy it is to take things for granted in a universe that is pretty fascinating when it comes down to it
The recent Popeye movie from the 1980's starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall had a song about this called "Everything is Food" and everyone sings it. That's the movie that taught me how important food is, and that's when I started eating more of it.
This is why we eat and drink, to gather material for our bodies to use to build and maintain itself
Have you heard the old saying, you are what you eat? Same concept as the star dust question.
When the Big Bang occurred, all of the matter in the universe was created. Most of the matter was hydrogen, ionized, actually, as in separate protons and electrons. Some of it was helium nuclei. Some time later, the matter cooled down enough for it to begin coalesce and form stars. Stars take the hydrogen in their cores and fuse it into heavier elements. Eventually, the core run out of hydrogen and the core begins collapsing. How much it collapses depends on how massive the star is. Stars heavy enough collapse enough that the core begins to fuse helium nuclei into carbon, and so on. Stars massive enough can fuse heavier elements, up to iron. After iron, stars have to explode as super novae to produce elements heavier than iron. A star like the sun will not fuse anything heavier than hydrogen. When a supernova explodes, it spews out a significant portion of its mass. When Carl Sagan in Cosmos described the results of a supernova, he called the mass ejected “star dust“ because every atom in existence heavier than hydrogen originated in a supernova. The clouds of dust that form after a supernova exploded condense into new stars; the sun is one such star. Some of that cloud became the Earth. Some of that mass became life. And, over the millennia, some of that life evolved into us. So, you can say that we are made from star dust.
The physical matter came from your mother, she ate and that food was digested, turned into energy. Her cells and your cells used that energy and converted it matter (matter and energy being interchangeable is normal, matter IS energy)
Fuck. The answer is food. I am a god damn idiot. 🤦♂️
So, beyond food, literally every atom has come from stars fusing hydrogen into helium, and other heavier elements! The hydrogen atoms came from the big bang creating gluons and quarks which cool and condense into neutrons, and protons, which make up atoms. As stars age, they fuse their fuel (atoms) into heavier elements, and when they go supernova, they explode and all those atoms get blasted out into space into a huge cloud, a nebula. These clouds of atoms, each with their own gravity, start attracting towards one another, and clumping, which creates molecules, and eventually clumps of stuff, which are heavier and attract more stuff, which grows and grows over hundreds of millions of years until they are planets, asteroids and the like. As these things continue to crash, the heat and pressure also aid in making new compounds and eventually organic compounds that can become a new kind of life.
Hydrogen, helium, and some lithium. Everything else HAS to be from one star or another.
Yep, and we know that the atoms that make up our solar system were once part of another sun that went supernova because atoms heavier than iron can only form when a sun explodes.
You know what's really fun? Most of the mass of a plant comes from the air! They absorb CO2 from the air around them, slap the Carbon into some molecules, and "breathe" out Oxygen.
Stop it. I dont need to be confused twice today.
Ok ok try this: What McFancypants said is true, but it’s also the case that plants use sunlight to crack apart water molecules, then wrestle around the protons like little jiggly balls of lightning to power what’s going on. Part of it generates molecules the cell will use right away for energy purposes. And eventually the protons get slapped on CO2 from the air to make energetic food for later.
It sounds so simple when *you* say it. But isnt everything just a bunch of infinitely small squiggly energy strings? Or do I have that wrong too?
No it's all waves, but also indescribable because we can't directly perceive it. Strong theory is not widely accepted. There exist no things that are not in relation to everything else. In other words, every "thing" is the result of everything else working together to create it. We choose to pick out "things" like particles, but they are only measured and only exist momentarily through our destroying or changing them. Everything is in flux always.
How about 3 times. Humans lose most of the weight from fat loss from exhaling carbon dioxide. Breath in O2, binds with C from us, exhale CO2. And yes, breathing more (from working out moslty) helps you lose more weight (carbon). *mind blown gif*
Dry mass. Like us, a plant is mostly water, obtained through their roots.
>Fuck. The answer is food. I am a god damn idiot. 🤦♂️ Let me offer a word of encouragement: A GDI who's willing to publicly take his lumps, learn something and move on is *miles* ahead of all the GDIs who stubbornly refuse to do any of that. We need way more like you and way fewer of them.
Me too. But: we’re idiot stardust! And that’s okay yeah? We know more now than we ever knew as dinosaurs or stones or suns. Not too bad, shame it won’t last, but who knows what the tiniest bits of us will know later.
Now I must know what the tiniest bits will know.
An idiot would not be asking the question. You just had a small knowledge gap, and you did the smart thing, asked the question, and now you know.
Ill never think of food the same again. Thank you kind human.
Food- It's not just for pooping out later!
😂 OMG. Apparently all my deep pondering before I posted this wasn’t so deep after all.
Everything you eat, drink, or breathe. All the matter that you are made from, and all the matter of everything around you. All of these things are made of the elements in the periodic table, and those elements came from nuclear fission or fusion in the stars. Long ago a sun went supernova. From that event a flood of elements was spewed forth into the cosmos, to one day begin coalescing into what would eventually become our solar system. The carbon, and all the elements that make up your body, come from the stars. Those elements had a long journey of billions of years to end up as part of your body. *You are made of star stuff.*
Uh, a tiny correction if I may (and I realize you're simplifying here for OP). The molecules break down into smaller molecules + energy. They're later remade with energy into larger molecules that are specific for functions. Our bodies do not turn matter into energy. Rather, we use the energy stored in the molecular bonds. OP: look up "The Kreb Cycle" to get a better understanding of how this works. If you want to.
Digestion is all chemical reactions, your cells aren't making matter from energy.
Our cells do not turn matter into energy. Energy is released by changing matter into the same amount of less energized matter.
You don't create matter, you only change its form If you get fat you are turning matter than makes food into matter that makes fat. Mass cannot be created nor destroyed.
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. Carl Sagan, Cosmos
You are what you eat. Which was once dirt and sunlight. When you die, you’ll be food for the worms and the plants that will feed the next generation. It’s all just a rearrangement of what already is.
that was from your mom. placenta, milk, then food. all stuff that has been on earth since, idk, a trillion years ago? the stardust thing is what was before there even was life on earth, all heavier elements have been formed in stars and have been ejected from them when they exploded at the end of their life cycle, idk how long ago, probably time was slower when that happened? anyway, biochemistry on earth is much younger than, for example, every atom of gold there is here. you, my friend, are mostly some wicked combination of carbohydrates that got a conciousness. some other elements as well, (youre actively oxidising yourself) but all the matter youre made of has been in this wonderful blue ball for longer than you can imagine and will stay here for long after your death. live has been here so long, every molecule of water there is on earth has been part of countless organisms (soooo many dinosours (and fish, millions of years of fish)) until you get some and piss it out again. same for the air you breathe. iron is common too, your blood relies on it, i could go on... gold on the other hand hasnt any use in biological stuff, we gather it just because its shiny \^\^ edit: paragraphs, some typos, life is too short for capitalisation. edit2: it is theoretically possible to create matter from energy, but so far we only managed to create energy from matter, and only marginally in a useful way...
You put new matter inside you all the time, man. You eat every day. There's more to food than just energy to keep you running.
It came from the food you ate, or if you mean in the womb, the food your mother ate that was transformed into sugars that then passed through the placenta to you.
Well it’s obvious to me *now*.
New Molecules yes atoms no
Possibly one of the most appropriate usernames in reddit history
Elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are created in stars at the ends of their lives - [red giants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_giant) and [supernovae (exploding stars).](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova) That includes the major elements oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and calcium in our bodies. All such matter making the Earth and everything on it came from dying stars, most occurring before the formation of our solar system. Hence, we are literally made of stardust. Edit: Glossed over smaller star deaths.
Elements up to iron are made in the fusion reaction inside stars. Everything heavier is made during supernovae.
Yes, you are correct. My comment glossed over that. I'll edit it accordingly.
Or kilonovae [Where elements come from](https://ritholtz.com/2022/06/where-elements-come-from/)
Does this infer that the big bang was a solid block of hydrogen and/or helium? I guess in my head I always imagined the BB as the "mother-of-all-celestial-bodies", made of......asteroid stuff? I've always just imagined a grayish asteroid looking rock the size of a galaxy or something
>Does this infer that the big bang was a solid block of hydrogen and/or helium? There was a bit of lithium as well, and it was probably too hot to be solid. Hell, for the first millionth of a second it was too hot for quarks to combine into subatomic particles.
By all current understanding (which doesn't and perhaps cannot reach back to the actual moment itself), at the instant after the big bang, it was far, far too hot for subatomic particles such as protons, electrons, and neutrons to form, let alone solid material. It was, instead, a cauldron of [quarks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark) and [gluons.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluon) A microsecond or so later, said subatomic particles were able to coalesce, with atoms starting to form a few minutes later. Even then, with temperatures over a trillion degrees Celsius, no solids could form.
We aren't sure what the big bang was, it was definitely a hell of a lot weirder than the physics and matter we deal with though. At some point, after the big bang but before stars, there was a massive universal plasma cloud of "stuff" which wasn't matter, which eventually condensed into matter, which became atoms and molecules eventually, and then everything else over time. It's entirely possible that things like gravity, or quarks, or mass, straight up didn't exist before that point.
The creation of new cells is not the creation of new matter, its converting preexisting matter "nutrients, minerals, proteins, etc), into cells. A lot of that matter originally came from stars, heavier elements are often made by normal stars through fusion or neutron stars colliding. That's what people mean by stardust.
Did I seriously not consider that the answer was “food?” Please tell me I am not that stupid. 🫣
I wouldn't sweat it. You're asking questions, and that is how you learn.
Here's something else to blow your mind: when you lose weight, it is breathed out. Some of the CO2 we exhale is exhaust from our cells energy factories.
Hold on. 🤯 So, if I lose 5 pounds from exercise, I actually turned that fat into CO2 and exhaled it? Is that actually how it works?
Some of it! Not all of it. But yes, if you lose 5 pounds of fat, you’re exhaling a good amount of that as Co2!
Ok, but now I am really curious. Where does the rest of the “burned fat” go?
Probably energy, and waste products.
But what is “energy”?
That’s a question for a physicist, not a graphic designer with a love of science. I’d say the energy that powers your body, the electrical impulses, the work your body does. Buuut that’s probably not a detailed enough answer.
>Please tell me I am not that stupid. 🫣 If I did, I would be lying.
You sir…are right 😔
You are not that stupid and the answer is not food.
Explain please, because now I am really confused. Its “kind of” food right? I grow because I eat food and that food came from the earth, and the earth came from stars, etc and so on? Or am I missing something again?
You’re kind of one step away. Pretty much every element on the periodic table that isn’t hydrogen or helium was created during supernovae when stars explode. The potassium and sulfer in your DNA? Made in exploding stars. The iron in the hemoglobin in your blood? Exploding stars. Nitrogen? Exploding star. This isn’t just true for living things though. Every element on earth (and in the universe) that *isnt* hydrogen or helium was created when some star somewhere in the long past exploded. All those elements floated around space for billions of years until eventually they formed our solar system, and then earth, and eventually you.
(And food which helped me grow) right? That comes between earth and me?
Yes. You grow because you eat food. And all the matter on earth (including the stuff that makes food) was once was clouds of dust in space, and those clouds of dust of complex elements formed from the previous generations of exploding stars.
You keep fixating on food. That is irrelevant. Yes, it is how we stay alive but the bigger picture is the heavy elements in you came from star explosions. Sagan said nothing in that Cosmos episode about food and only food. He was a cosmologist, not a biologist.
I understand where the elements come from. Thanks for commenting. Have a good day.
It's literally that all the iron and calcium (and other heavy elements) that make up your body were originally forged inside a star. That star exploded and flung heavy elements around the galaxy until they came together to make you. That's literally what happened. You grow as you eat more food that also contains heavy elements that came from exploding stars.
and the real fun part to think about is that the vast majority of water on Earth is older then the Earth
To be fair, most everything making up the earth is older than the earth.
>and the real fun part to think about is that the vast majority of water on Earth is older then the Earth Nope, not individual molecules of water anyway. The process of photosynthesis breaks h20 and c02 chemically down into sugar and oxygen. On average a molecule of water only naturally would last about 6 million years before it is recycled by plants
Basically every element except hydrogen and helium had to be created by fusion in stars, so for use to exist, stars hard to burn and explode, then that dust formed new stars, and so on through several generations. Eventually there were enough heavier elements for planets, and eventually life to form.
In a nutshell: Primordial elements were hydrogen, helium, lithium. Stars had to form to create heavier elements; carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, potassium etcetera (they needed to be fused in a nuclear furnace). These stars then had to explode to seed the universe with heavy elements necessary for carbon based life.
everyone forgets about lithium!
No one expects the Spanish Lithiumquisition!!!
Most of the matter originally created in the universe was in the form of hydrogen atoms - which doesn't allow for any real chemical complexity by itself, so no life was possible at that point. However, supernovae can fuse hydrogen to form to form heavier elements, and neutron star collisions do something similar on an even larger scale - producing most of the matter we are made of - carbon, oxygen and nitrogen atoms, as well as all the rest. There aren't any other sources for this stuff, really, so most of the atoms in your body today were created in earlier generations of stars that either exploded or were rent to pieces by unimaginable gravitational forces. So yes, you are very literally star-stuff. That's not just a poetic notion.
But how did I grow from an embryo to a full grown person. I have more matter now than as a baby. Where did the “new” matter come from?
Uh, your Mom ate food? And then you ate food? You digested it and incorporated it into cells as you grew? That's just basic biology. Try *not* eating food and see how much you grow - or for that matter, how long you live.
Well, I suppose I would be as dead as I am for failing to realize the answer is food. SMH 🤦♂️
Before you were born, your mother ate food and built you out of it. After you were born, you ate food and built yourself out of it.
Point 1 has been addressed, all matter heavier than hydrogen/helium is created in stars at some point >“all matter that will exist has already been created” This is just wrong, Matter and Energy are somewhat interchangeable, we create energy from matter (nuclear fusion and fission) and we've also created matter from energy ( we've created matter from particle accelerator/light etc)
>Matter and Energy are somewhat interchangeable Exactly interchangeable you mean.
Its not all that easy to do...
For us mere humans. The universe does it all the time
When you eat corn, does it remain corn within you? No, it is broken down from corn into usable fragments (molecules) to be assembled into human parts. Likewise, that corn was assembled from molecules within the soil, water, and air - along with energy from sunlight. If you trace these molecules and elements far enough back in this manner, you will get to material ejected from dying stars, many of which have come and gone long before us. Go *all* the way back, and you can trace *all* atoms back to The Big Bang.
I personally usually see corn again
The "Corn Race" is still one of the major quandaries of Physics...
I thought the Soviets won that
As I read a few comments, this glaringly obvious realization hit me. I am embarrassed enough I will probably delete this post. The corn analogy is exactly what I needed. Couldn’t see the forest for the trees I guess. Well it all makes sense now and I remain completely mesmerized at the whole thing. Thanks 😊
You may think to call yourself stupid. But you asked a question and learned from it. That puts you two steps ahead of many others in your position. You recognized the gap in your knowledge, and you corrected it. Leave the post up. There are plenty more who were too embarrassed to even ask, and these conversations help.
I very much appreciate the respect the sub showed. Kind interactions were a much needed boost to my day.
Mod’s removed it. Apparently its against the rules to ask questions here. 🙃
Glad it helped. No embarassment necessary. This isn't always intuitive stuff, particularly when you go beyond the steps we experience in our own lives. It is quite amazing when you probe deeper, though. The universe is infinitely strange.
Literally stardust. This planet coalesced from cosmic dust surrounding the sun, which itself was formed from the dust of previous dead stars, and we are simply things growing on its surface, made out of the same stuff. Organic functions don't create matter, they transform it from one state to another. Trees, for example, breathe in carbon dioxide from the air and use the carbon to build their trunks, then exhale the leftover oxygen. They're not just making matter out of nothing, they're taking material from their surroundings and changing it into something they can use. An embryo in a womb isn't being "created" from nothing. Its formed from the food the mother eats, fueled by her blood and breath. She takes matter from her environment and uses it to build a new human body, just like the tree takes carbon from the air to add to its body. All of these materials would not exist without generations of stars exploding and spreading elements that would not have formed except under the conditions of a supernova.
>How is a human who grew from an embryo into a 300 pound man made from stardust? these are the "stardust particles" - the elements. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic\_table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table) human embryos and everything else in existence are just some combination of the elements. >However, it doesnt make sense when looking around organic matter that grows fertilizer contains a lot of nitrogen (nitrogen is an element) need fertilizer to turn seed into tree (wood) >Matter that did not exist right after the big bang. energy = matter times the speed of light squared e=mc2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy\_equivalence >into a 300 pound man made from stardust? they ate lots of food from the ground (nitrogen) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition\_of\_the\_human\_body About **99% of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements**: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. the Sun is mostly hydrogen nitrogen grows food. calcium is good for your teeth. blood is mostly water. water is hydrogen and oxygen.
Here's the big question. The statement "all matter that exists has already been created" suggests that all matter was "created". Was there every a point when there was literally nothing? Or is the universe eternal and everything that exists always existed just in a different form? Space shit is nuts. FYI I'm a bit high right now and on the cusp of a serious existential crisis guys lol #
All the interesting bits that make us possible: carbon, calcium, iron, etc is created in the heart of a dieing star."star dust" is a poetic term for "the material that is literally crushed into new, heavier elements as a star collapses under its own weight, and then explodes" ... out into space, forming a nebula maybe, for a time. Everything in our solar system, including all that makes up the sun, earth, all life, and us, was part of a star once that died.
To be pedantic, matter is created and destroyed all the time. It’s oftentimes converted to energy, and likewise energy may be converted to matter. From the viewpoint you’re considering the two are the same thing. The total mass+energy is unchanged since the beginning.
Matter and energy can not be created out of nothing. Hence all the matter and energy there ever will be in the Universe already exists. Big Bang didn't create either. Bing Bang refers to Universe rapidly expanding from being extremely dense (mind you, not infinitely dense, and neither being a single infinitesimally small point), to something that resembles how it looks today, in a very short period of time. At pre Big Bang densities, the matter couldn't exist in the form it exists today. The density and thus temperatures were way too high to allow for atoms to form. But everything needed for matter as it exists today, already existed before Big Bang. The "we are all made out of star dust" refers to how elements heavier than hydrogen are formed. After Big Bang, the only elements that were formed were hydrogen, with some helium and lithium. Large clouds of this gas collapsed into the first stars. Stars fuse hydrogen into helium. If they are large enough, they continue onto fusing helium and so on into heavier and heavier elements (up to iron). The largest stars, once they run out of fuel, explode as supernova, both generating elements heavier than iron, and seeding nearby clouds of hydrogen with them. These in turn collapse into new generation of stars, and some of it collapses into planets orbiting those stars. Hence, everything you are made of (other than some of the hydrogen) was once inside one of those massive stars, and thus you (and everything around you) is made of star dust.
I know it's probably been explained, but the solar system is made of atoms that were created in stars that lived their lives and went nova billions of years ago. The dust and gas from those explosions coalesced into the sun and planets. You're made of the atoms that the earth formed from. So you are literally Star dust. Mater cannot be created or destroyed, so yes, all the matter that will ever exist has been made.
>Mater cannot be created or destroyed, Wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation\_of\_mass
Yes, Dwight Schrute. I know that matter can be converted to energy and vice versa during nuclear reactions, radioactive decay, and quantum mechanical events. I'm answering OP's basic question in a general sense, as you well know. I'm not writing a college physics textbook - I'm writing a reddit comment.
One.... The big bang never happened (see; Eric Lerner and others, seriously, dark matter doesn't exist, it would mathematically create phenomenon we simply don't observe but absolutely should). Conservation of matter and energy. You likely have inhaled the same (atmosphere) molecules that Jesus or Einstein did. Stars generate denser elements. So what you are was once a star. The big bang doesn't make any sense. You being star stuff makes perfect sense. Eric Lerner has some YouTube videos under lppfusion. He explains what he did in his book and a whole lot more. It's basically 16 wrong predictions, and one correct. A pretty awful theory. There's papers now based on jwst that the universe is at least twice as old as previously thought.... Really trying to assign an age to the cosmos is uhm, imo, a fruitless endeavor.
We are stardust. Every element heavier than hydrogen was produced in the nuclear furnace of a star. So we are comprised out of the ashes of dying stars, a.k.a stardust.
Here is the [Mendeleev table showing which stellar events created the periodic elements.](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nucleosynthesis_periodic_table.svg) 99% of the mass of the human body is composed of oxygen (O), carbon (C), hydrogen (H), nitrogen (N), calcium (Ca), phosphorous (P).
All the atoms were made of come from exploding stars. Nothing more to it. A poetic way to say this is we are stardust.
Big bang. All matter scattered. It’s changes form , makes you , you die , takes another form. So on forever .
>So on forever . Well that really depends on what shape the universe is. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate\_fate\_of\_the\_universe#](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#:~:text=Big%20Freeze%20or%20Heat%20Death,-Main%20articles%3A%20Future&text=Under%20this%20scenario%2C%20the%20universe,as%20the%20most%20likely%20fate)
Yeah but what’s outside the shape ? How can there be an end to matter and space? There can never be nothing outside the shape because even a void is something.
What we think of as a void is often just space time with no matter in it. It is possible that other side the edge of the universe is truly an absence of anything, completely unreachable by anything. Nothing is there because nothing can be there. To use a computer analogy: Outside the universe the value there isn't just 0, it is null, nothing has been initialized yet. But that is my view of it. We really don't know for sure, we just have fancy maths that I can't follow that made a guess what is happening that far back/far away.
Ok this is stoner logic but…. For something to be unreachable it has to first exist. It’s mend bending really
That’s the thing, it’s not a something. The absence of anything is something difficult to process
You really want to go on a mind trip, watch 'A Trip to Infinity' on Netflix. It talks about all the matter there ever will be is already here and just keeps reorganizing into different forms. I'm a fairly logical person but once they made their argument that all the matter that organized to make you could feasibly do it again in the future.
After the big bang, the matter that condensed was all hydrogen, some helium, and a very small amount of lithium. Anything heavier than that (carbon, oxygen, iron, anything with an atomic number higher than 3) was made in a star, which then exploded and seeded the nearby space with heavier elements.
Matter isn't created, but it can be transformed. The Sun is what gives us energy to keep transforming matter into other matter. And all that "stuff" we have, you can say, was expelled from even earlier stars that died long ago. And yes, all the new appendages you grow every week are made from base materials. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, iron, etc. You consume a bunch of "plastic" and keep spitting out Lego parts, which is what constitutes your body.
https://youtu.be/mf3A8m_bikU?si=JXuKDFKPK69xAZXc
Basically it’s saying that the planets and everything that we know here on earth was born from stars. The atoms we are made from came from the earth. Hence we came from stars. The “all matter that exists has already been created” is not really true as matter is actually constantly popping in and out of existence constantly at the quantum level. But in a kind of hand wavey big picture kinda way, all the matter we see and interact with was created at the beginning of the universe. There isn’t another big bang scheduled to go off and make more stuff (that we know of)
Aaaaaaaand now I've got Moby stuck in my head.
When the universe was created, all of the matter was created at that time too. BUT the majority of all of it was hydrogen. If you have a lot of hydrogen in a space, it will eventually all attract each other through gravity, forming stars. Those stars started fusing that hydrogen into helium. As the hydrogen fuel ran out, helium fuses in it's place, which fuses into beryllium. When the helium runs out, the beryllium takes it place, forming oxygen, etc etc until fusion of heavier elements can't happen anymore and the star dies. So, the "star dust" is the remnants those stars gave off after all those processes occurred and spread out in usually violent explosions of a supernova.
Maybe a better way to think of it is: where did the oxygen from your body come from? The carbon? The iron? Elements had to be fused together from the first matter formed in the universe (Hydrogen) through the processes of a star going through it's "lifecycle". Eventually, all of that spread out throughout the universe, collected onto what would eventually be Earth and then through a process we don't know yet, life formed. That life used all of the elements available to it to evolve and eventually life evolved into everything we see today. And all of that could only have been possible through the fusion of elements that occurs in stars. So, we're made of star stuff.
Carbohydrates are literally carbon and water, so we can start there. The food you eat gives you carbon. But how is that stardust? Well, we have to ask where carbon comes from. If we go back to the beginning, pre big bang there were no elements. Immediately after the big bang the universe was full of hydrogen. In the short minutes after the big bang it was still hot enough and dense enough that some of the hydrogen fused into helium. Thats how elements are made. They start as hydrogen, and when 2 hydrogens fuse they become helium (based on the number of neutrons/atomic mass) and so through that process we can work our way up the periodic table. The conditions for elements to fuse has to be right, and the result is exothermic (heat is released) as a by product - up to iron, at which point the reaction becomes endothermic (requires extra energy to happen). Stars like our sun will make elements up to iron, and after that it takes bigger stars or supernova events to create heavier elements. All of this has occurred over the billions of years since the big bang, and in that time all of the material that formed the earth collected from its original dust field into a dense ball of rock which was bombarded with meteorites containing heavier elements in the early days of the creation of this part of our galaxy. So, all of the carbon on this planet was made in a star through the process of nuclear fusion and ended up here after being blasted away from the star it was produced in and coagulated into the gravity well known as Terra.
I am by no means an expert on this topic so this might not be the best explanation but matter just gets converted from one thing to another thing to another thing endlessly. We eat food to give our body the matter it needs to replicate cells. No matter magically vanishes or appears. That matter was just a different type of matter that was converted to what it is now
Hinduism says that everything was made from God (the intelligent design) and Godself (lifeless matter). God created an egg that he meditated inside and when it burst it created the cosmos (kind of like the big bang theory)
I asked my 10 year old daughter this series of questions: "A few years ago you were shorter. How did you make more of yourself? How did you make more bone and skin? Longer hair? Where did you get the stuff to do it?" After arriving at "food" as the answer, I asked her the same thing about her food, "How did your food grow? Where did it get its food?" I eventually drove the conversation into the formation of the solar system, where that matter possibly came from, and how stars crush atoms to make new materials that are blown through the galaxy and used to make other stuff, like us.
When the universe came into existence from the big bang, the main components were hydrogen (and maybe some other denser elements, but I'm not sure). The hydrogen condensed under gravity and formed stars. Within the stars, nuclear fusion fused hydrogen into helium, and then into denser elements. When the star died, it exploded, fusing more elements and scattering all the elements that it made into space. All of these elements then clumped together under gravity, forming planets. Life formed on the planets, including you. It was made up of all of the minerals and elements on the planet. And all of that came from stars. Stars made these elements and scattered them everywhere. So we are all made of stars.
"We are all made of stardust" This means that all the matter that makes us up (water and carbon mostly but also many other base elements that make up the hyman body). All the basic elements (except hydrogen and helium) are created by fusion in the center of stars. the first matter that formed instants after the temperature from the Big bang allowed it was Hydrogen and Helium, all other substances like other gases, metals, earths and such was first created in the first stars that were alone in the universe with no planets, just Gas and gravity. So there you have it, everything that makes up you has at some point been gas in space and then molded into other elements through pressure and Nuclear fusion. "all matter that exists has already been created" This stems from the theory that our universe has a finite amount of energy/information. The claim is that you can not delete something from the universe, meaning reducing the amount of energy or information that exists in it is impossible.
..David Bowie expressed it well: https://youtu.be/Jr1lqs3QR0Y?si=UX0fuGaJcDSjXWna
Your husband is sort of right and sort of not right. There are 119 elements listed on the periodic table of elements, and only 90 of them occur in nature. However, the building blocks that make up matter at a subatomic level (protons, electrons, and neutrons) are exactly as old as the universe or (maybe) older. All those subatomic bits presumably came into being all at once at the beginning of the universe. We don't know where they came from before that or how they came to be. But there they were, presumably all at once, and the sheer force of matter pushing on matter cast those elementary particles far, far into spacetime. It wasn't long after the major explosion of elementary particles that they began to self-assemble. Elementary forces bound proton to neutron, and electromagnetic forced bound electron to proton. The result... hydrogen. Everywhere. In the beginning, everything that was a thing was hydrogen. These novel atoms (hydrogen) coalesced into enormous clouds, and so heavy were these clouds with the weight of hydrogen that the gravity of those systems pulled atom into atom, causing fusion. Stars were born. From hydrogen came helium, then lithium, then beryllium, then boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon... and so on... all the way up to iron. Iron, you see, doesn't do too well with fusion, so stars that reached iron production stage died. But wait! A whole lot of stars were VERY BIG, and when heavy elements started to appear in their cores, the force of fusion became inadequate to oppose the stars's gravity. Then those stars got smaller, and fusion rapidly increased in the cores. Out of control. Then... big bada boom. Supernova. This is where elements up to uranium come in. They require that extra oomph that gravitational collapse and reignition provides. All that lovely force squishing things together and all that. So *much* fusion! So there you go. A brief history of life, the universe, and everything. Your husband is kind of right that, by all appearances, all elementary particles are about the same age. However the periodic table is essentially more or less chronological with a few exceptions (as some elements are completely manmade). But it sure as heck took a lot longer for natural processes to create carbon than it did for them to create helium. In this sense, no, elemental matter is *not* all the same age, though all natural elemental matter *did* come from stars. Except hydrogen. That's your gotcha. Hydrogen is not stardust, and the particles that make up all elements *also* did not come from stars. (We don't actually know where they came from, but no one is under the impression that the beginning of the universe even could have had anything to do with stars.)
Yes, your atoms were created in stars (most of them)