“Life in the universe seems to be balanced on a knife edge. Shift any of the states in beryllium, carbon, or oxygen just a whisker in the wrong direction and you end up with a carbon-free universe, one with no life, or at least not life as we know it. It’s as if some great cosmic tinkerer has carefully arranged their subtle nuclear properties so that enough of these atoms could get forged inside stars, sprayed out across the cosmos, and then, by a series of random accidents over billions of years, come together to form walking, talking collections of atoms that spend at least some of their time wondering about how they got there.”
From the book “How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch. In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang” by Harry Cliff.
“While most of the cells in your body regenerate every seven to 15 years, many of the particles that make up those cells have actually existed for millions of millennia. The hydrogen atoms in you were produced in the big bang, and the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms were made in burning stars. The very heavy elements in you were made in exploding stars.
The size of an atom is governed by the average location of its electrons. Nuclei are around 100,000 times smaller than the atoms they’re housed in. If the nucleus were the size of a peanut, the atom would be about the size of a baseball stadium. If we lost all the dead space inside our atoms, we would each be able to fit into a particle of lead dust, and the entire human race would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.
As you might guess, these spaced-out particles make up only a tiny portion of your mass. The protons and neutrons inside of an atom’s nucleus are each made up of three quarks. The mass of the quarks, which comes from their interaction with the Higgs field, accounts for just a few percent of the mass of a proton or neutron. Gluons, carriers of the strong nuclear force that holds these quarks together, are completely massless.
If your mass doesn’t come from the masses of these particles, where does it come from? Energy. Scientists believe that almost all of your body’s mass comes from the kinetic energy of the quarks and the binding energy of the gluons.”
From “The particle physics of you”: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-particle-physics-of-you.