Huffington blog DARE TO BE 100
June 20, 2017
UNAWARE
And you thought that not much was going on. Every person on earth is moving at a thousand miles per hour as the Earth spins on its axis. The reason that we are unaware of this race track is that the speed of rotation is constant, and accordingly only change in speed is recognizable. Also, in another plane we are moving at 67,000 mph which is how fast the earth is circumnavigating the sun. And even more astounding is the fact that we are going 1.9 million miles per hour as our Milky Way zooms around the greater cosmos.
At the same time as we identify our ignorance of our status in the greater cosmos we are similarly unaware of what’s going on in our inner cosmos. That is even more remarkable. The human body contains 10 trillion cells that are in turn made up of atoms, seven octillion of them. These tiny units make up molecules 99% which are water molecules. These water molecules don’t just hang around. They are in constant motion. The esteemed physicist Peter Hoffman has termed a “molecular storm” to describe the intense thermal jiggling of these molecules. These water molecules collide with another molecule trillions of times per second in a maelstrom that puts ordinary storms to shame. Analogous to this tempest would be trying to catch a ball while at the same instant hundreds of millions of other balls are headed your way. The force that causes this jiggling is known as Brownian Movement named after botanist Robert Brown, analogized to dust particles in a beam of light. The residual energy of these molecular movements is thought to be a remnant of the explosion unleashed at the Big Bang. Mr. Einstein contributed much to our understanding of this feature.
The molecular storm is visible by a new tool, the AFM, the atomic force microscope which has a resolution a thousand times stronger than a conventional microscope. The AFM is the window into our nano function and structure. With it we can actually SEE an atom.
The AFM reveals that every molecule experiences 10 billion collisions with every other water molecule in the cell every millisecond. The energy of this storm is harnessed by the cellular machinery pushing and shoving and twisting until the nano anatomy is optimally arrayed.
While the energies inherent in the molecular storm are intrinsic to cellular development they may also represent the fundamental causation of aging as, over time, the molecular fidelity is stressed by the molecular storm, and we “wear out”, just like everything else in the universe does.
And now you know the rest of the story. We humans really get around.