When I was ten, I read with astonishment that with each breath, I was inhaling molecules that were breathed by the mathematician Archimedes over two thousand years ago.
This sort of invocation of chemistry as a magic history-spanning bridge can be traced back to James Jeans, the English scientist and mathematician, who in his 1940 book “The Kinetic Theory of Gases” wrote: “If we assume that the last breath of, say, Julius Caesar has by now become thoroughly scattered through the atmosphere, then the chances are that each of us inhales one molecule of it with every breath we take.” The science writer Sam Kean recently wrote an entire book, “Caesar’s Last Breath”, that takes this proposition as its starting point.
In between Jeans and Kean, other writers making the same point have replaced Caesar by Archimedes or Jesus or da Vinci. I prefer Archimedes, because he was the first of the ancient Greek mathematicians to come to grips with really big numbers and to connect the macroscopic and microscopic realms; in “The Sand Reckoner” he calculated how many grains of sand would fill the universe as the Greeks understood it.
As I write this essay in April 2020, human society has been violently tipped on its side, and the eight billion or so people who share this planet have come to realize how small the world has become epidemiologically. We’ve also become fearfully conscious of the contents of the air we bring into our bodies. Perhaps now is a good time to take a deep and hopefully healthy breath and think a bit about how the content of our lungs connects us to people far away in space and time, situated in a past that, even at a remove of a few months, feels very distant.