Notes from Bryson:

Religion has never filled my ‘curiosity void’ or satisfied my intellectual hunger regarding the eternal questions – what comes after this life – and what is this life all about? 

Religion has likewise never offered me any great ‘spiritual comfort’ - simply because I don’t adhere to the proposal there’s a personified spook lurking deep within the confines of my body;  an amorphous entity awaiting blessed release from its beastly physical restraints.  The moment of my demise allows it to poof joyfully into the heavens, there to sit on a cloud whilst watching the world go by, until the world and indeed, the solar system, ceases to exist. 

The following passage from Bill Bryson, makes more sense to me than all the ghostly afterlife stories offered up by a plethora of religious organizations; after reading it I truly wonder why anyone could desire a more complex explanation, or a touchy-feely story to ease their often painful passing from this mortal coil.

Bill Bryson:  ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ pp. 176 – Ch. 9: The Mighty Atom.  Bryson rattles on about the properties of atoms a couple of times in his book, but the magic thing is, I found great comfort in the basic logic conveyed by such a simple scientific explanation that runs something like this…

…The great Caltech physicist, Richard Feynman, once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be:  ‘All things are made of atoms’.  They are everywhere and they constitute everything.  Look around you.  It is all atoms. Not just the solid things like walls and tables and sofas, but the air in between.  And they are in numbers that you really cannot conceive.

The basic working arrangement of atoms is the molecule.  A molecule is simply two or more atoms working together in a more or less stable arrangement…

At sea level, at a temperature of 0 degrees Celsius, one cubic centimetre of air (that is, a space about the size of a sugar cube) will contain 45 billion billion molecules. And they are in every single cubic centimetre you see around you.  Think how many cubic centimetres there are in the world outside your window – how many sugar cubes it would take to fill that view.  Then think how many it would take to build a universe.  Atoms, in short, are very abundant. 

They are also fantastically durable.  Because they are so long-lived, atoms really get around.  Every atom you possess (in your body) has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.

We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare.  A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name…

So, we are all reincarnations – though short-lived ones.  When we die, our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere – as part of a leaf or other human being or drop of dew.  Atoms themselves, however, go on practically forever.  Nobody actually knows how long an atom can survive, but according to Martin Rees it is probably 10³⁵ years – a number so big that even I am happy to express it in mathematical notation…

For those who have ever puzzled as to why – if we are all made of atoms and likewise all other solid and nonsolid objects – we can’t walk through walls, or perform all sorts of other remarkable feats 

PP. 184

…, if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral the nucleus would only be about the size of a fly – but a fly many times heavier than the cathedral.  It was this spaciousness – this resounding, unexpected roominess – that had Rutherford scratching his head in 1910.

It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion.  When two objects come together in the real world – billiard balls are most often used for illustration – they don’t actually strike each other.  ‘Rather’, as Timothy Ferris explains, ‘the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other… [W]ere it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.’ When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.