The subject of death has been dreaded and debated alike. Some believe we reincarnate some don’t. Regardless, the bit that we are actually made of- Atoms undergoes changes. So what are these changes and What happens to our atoms?
What is reincarnation? A cowboy asked his friend.
It starts, his old pal told him when your life comes to an end.
They wash your neck and comb your hair and clean your fingernails,
And put you in a padded box away from life’s travails.The box and you go in a hole that’s been dug in the ground.
Reincarnation starts in when you’re planted neath that mound.
Them clods melt down, just like the box, and you who is inside.
And that’s when you begin your transformation rideby Wallace McRae
When Religion and Science collide
According to one school of thought, that derives its course from The Religious(Hindu-Cremation, Islam/Christianity-Burial) and scientific aspects can be explained as below.
First, long termYou are either buried (embalmed or not) or burned. There are a few other options, but they are rare.
If you are buried, your soft tissues are eventually eaten by bacteria and small organisms. Much of that becomes carbon dioxide, and the rest becomes the bodies of these organisms or their children.
If you are burned, your soft tissues are consumed by oxygen and mostly turned into carbon dioxide, water, and some nitrogen and sulfur oxides.
In both cases, the long-term destination for those chemicals is the biosphere. You become food for other organisms.
Even your bones decay, albeit much more slowly. The calcium and phosphorus in bones will be incorporated into plants.
Some day the plants will be consumed by animals. Those animals will eventually die, be consumed, and cycle through the biosphere over and over again.
Eventually, tiny bits of you will end up reaching your great grandchildren’s food or even air.
Technically, your You really WILL live on – in the life on this planet.
What Happens When You Die According to The Quantum Science
Another school of thought that totally remains fixated on the scientific aspect plays out as follows:
The Space-Time Speed Limit.
This makes a solid case the for the belief that atoms do not die,b ut can lose or gain mass when the do fission or fusion. We have four dimensions: X, Y, Z and Time.
The sum of the speyou are going in all four dimensions adds up to the speed of light; the universal speed limit.So, if you’re going the speed of light in the X, Y and Z directions, time must equal zero for you.
Einstein explained this using his twin paradox. But, it also effects atoms. Atoms are composed of many subatomic particles which gyrate or move at (or near) the speed of light.
So most atoms do not “experience” time.
The Chemistry of Death
Once our body is completely kaput, that is, dead, that last batch of atoms that we had will persist, though some will radioactively decay over time, some chemical bonds will break, some new ones will form, and so on. Our atoms may become part of other life forms and pass through them as part of their metabolism. Or we might leave traces as a fossil. Whether our last batch of atoms moves on into the air, grass, a bone, or a rock, they are essentially recycled by natural forces.
Will our atoms go on forever? Probably not. If say ones hydrogen atoms end up in a star, they will get fused into larger atoms, and if that star goes supernova, they may get fused into even higher atomic number elements. And at the extreme end, if the universe ultimately collapses into a Big Crunch, all the atoms that ever existed would be gone.
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