I was pondering mortality the other day. Someone had asked me the usual “maybe there is a heaven; so how do you know where you’ll go when you die?” I told her I’d turn into a different arrangement of atoms, and that would be that.
So I got to thinking, what would happen to my constituent atoms–in rough order of events per atom–over very long time scales until the Big Crunch, or whatever?
Once I know the Dope, maybe I’ll ponder better.
Well, for as long as the Earth exists, your atoms will probably mostly continue to get cycled through various living things and the atmosphere, getting scattered across the globe in the process.
Eventually, the Sun will die and put an end to that (as well as to the Earth). When that happens, your atoms will probably end up mostly scattered about in the resulting planetary nebula, with some doubtless accreting onto the central white dwarf.
The ones on the white dwarf will pretty much just stay there indefinitely, while the ones in the planetary nebula might eventually coalesce into larger nebulae, whence some of them might collapse into new stars or planets. If this happens, then some of the hydrogen atoms will end up getting fused with other hydrogens into helium, but the rest of them will probably be unscathed (though they might end up getting some of their nucleons swapped out in the course of the CNO cycle). And there’s a chance that they’ll end up in a star large enough to fuse them, too.
After those next-generation stars die, some of them will be scattered into space again, and some will accrete onto the stellar remnants (white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes). Repeat this process until they’re all accreted onto remnants of some sort or other. The ones on white dwarfs won’t do much, the ones on neutron stars will likely fuse, and the ones that fall into black holes are in all meaningful senses lost.
With time, the white dwarfs and neutron stars will cool to arbitrarily low temperatures. Current models suggest that eventually (after an extremely long time, far longer than the Universe has existed thus far), even protons will decay, and presumably so will everything made up of protons and neutrons. Ultimately, this decay would lead to a mixture of photons and neutrinos, some of which could be traced back to particles which were once in your body.
After an even far longer amount of time, the black holes will evaporate, too, resulting in mostly neutrinos, photons, and gravitons. Unlike with the proton decay, no particular Hawking radiation particle can be traced to any particular particle which fell into the hole, so you’ll just have to settle for claiming fractional ownership (a very small fraction) of each of the resulting particles.
The photons, neutrinos, and gravitons, meanwhile, will just continue through space forever. As the expansion of the Universe continues, the photons and gravitons will be redshifted to arbitrarily low energies, while the neutrinos gradually come to a stop.
Is it likely that after being “liberated”, they are used in some particle physics experiments? Hydrogen might be used in the LHC and become other elementary particles, or even if it wasn’t used, it might encounter antimatter and annihilate into gamma rays.
Great answer Chronos. I have a related question: What are the short term fates of the atoms in my body? Feynman once illustrated the beauty of science by quoting a paper and concluding, “So what is this brain that sees and hears and thinks and wonders about wondering? Last weeks potatoes!”.
So how long do I get to lay claim to my atoms? Weeks? Years? My whole life in some cases? And how does that break down across different body tissues? I assume I have some atoms I had when I was born. How many and which ones?
Not only do you have some atoms you had when you were born, you also have some atoms that Aristotle and Confucius and Jesus and Abraham had when they were born, too (though probably not in the same places).
I’m not sure, though, how quickly atoms of various parts of the body exchange with the environment. In particular, I think the atoms in the hard parts of bones probably stay put for a long time.
Well, this was part of the OP, more or less (let’s all gang up on Chronos).
After the atoms are liberated from a now vaporized Earth, which elements and in what order do they suffer their fates? That is, before the super-long scale ultimate ultimate times you have described…which I had asked for of course, and you answered with your usual comprehensiveness and grace.
sing “where have all the flowers gone.”
Where have all the young girls gone is what I want to know. I’m certainly not one of the husbands…
I’m not sure about this – you can’t really put labels onto particles that identify one particle as ‘this one particle here’ and the other as ‘that one particle there’, at least not in interacting quantum field theories, where the general state is some superposition of Fock space (many-particle) states. Particles don’t have haecceity or ‘primitive thisness’ in that way.
On the other hand, information carried by those particles will, in general, and in principle, always be recoverable – likely even after falling into a black hole and being Hawking-radiated out again. So there’s some trace that never quite goes away – though the task of recovering it can be likened to reconstructing the story of a book that’s been burned from the ashes and the smoke.
Well, information in a black hole is a matter of considerable debate, to say the least.
And while there’s no guarantee that an atom doesn’t spontaneously swap with another identical atom halfway across the Universe, I’m assuming for the sake of simplicity that this doesn’t happen, since otherwise the question is unanswerable.
Holy Cats, the Subtle Doctor himself makes an appearance! I’m glad to see this; it made me dig out my Scotus. I’d like to see your elaboration.
I’m having a hard time imagining how the neutrinos slow down. The expansion saps their energy, yes? So what do they slow down with respect to? They would be the only massive objects left in the universe, right?
With respect to the coordinate system implied by the cosmological evolution. Yes, the Universe as a whole has something that can be described as a preferred reference frame at each point. No, this doesn’t violate special relativity, because it’s nonlocal, and a different reference frame at each point.
Well, roughly, elementary particles are not the sort of things that can be counted, they can only be aggregated – i.e. you can say there’s 25 neutrinos, but you can’t say that this is neutrino no. 1, this is neutrino no.2, etc. All classical objects, you can essentially slap a label on that distinguishes one object from other objects of the same kind, that makes it this here object rather than that there one; this doesn’t work for quantum particles. The reason for that is basically that two quantum particles of the same kind are absolutely identical, so that you’d end up with the same physical situation if you exchanged them; and in principle, such exchange processes are spontaneously possible, so if you have, say, two particles moving from A to B and from C to D, it’s impossible to differentiate between the cases ‘particle 1 moves from A to B, particle 2 moves from C to D’ and ‘particle 1 moves from A to D, particle 2 moves from C to B’; both are physically identical, so even if you had assigned each particle a certain label, it looses that identification immediately.
Half Man, thanks. I’ll think about this. Especially before running it by its relationship with Scotus, which is surely a profound, made to order one. Is the concept “haecceity” invoked by physicists, or only by the more philosophy of science types?
Back to the OP. I realize I am shifting time scales right and left, but here’s another question that could help me out. They always talk about Carbon dating (Carbon14?). OK. I look at a lump of pure carbon long enough, 1/2 of it will be not-carbon after some known amount of time: its half life. After 1/2 of that time --the time allotted to that reduced amount of carbon left–I get 1/4 of the lump remaining. When does this end? It feels like the carbon is Zeno’s damn arrow.
Interesting issue about bodily resurrection I had never considered before. As others have pointed out, the atoms that were contained in your body were also at various points in time contained in the bodies of dozens of other people (even if you limit it to time of death).
Now I can accept the premise that an omnipotent God could gather back together the scattered atoms that formed my body and rebuild me. But how is he going to be able to use those same atoms in the simultaneous rebuilding of dozens of other bodies? My understanding of bodily resurrection is that it’s supposed to be your actual body being resurrected, not a duplicate. So he can’t just substitute in some other replacement atoms because the result wouldn’t be my actual body.
It ends when you run out of atoms. Given that you have a finite mass of carbon, and each atom has a non-zero mass which contributes to the total, even someone entirely ignorant of calculus (such as Zeno) can see that you must have a finite number of atoms to watch, and you can stop watching when the last one decays.
OK, I have a question now: After the last black holes have evaporated, the last protons have decayed, the last soap opera has gone off the air, and, yes, even ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ has died, the Universe itself keeps expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whizz, as you stated.
So the vacuum of space just gets harder and harder, with less and less entropy per unit volume, leading, asymptotically, to a completely certain Universe? Or is there a different limit to this process?
So far as we can tell, yes, that’s correct. But of course such extreme situations have plenty of room for physics as yet unknown to us.
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.