For some reason, Caesar's dying breath, his last exhalation, has become a classic teaching tool in high school and college. When Caesar exhaled, he released an enormous number of "breath" molecules, mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide. It's a very, very big number says Dan Nocera, chemistry professor at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT). By Nocera's calculation: .05 x 6 x 10 to the 23rd.
"10 to the 23rd" all by itself looks ridiculously large. It's 10 followed by 22 zeros:
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Over the years, a number of scholars have tried to figure out what typically would happen to all those molecules. They figured some were absorbed by plants, some by animals, some by water -- and a large portion would float free and spread themselves all around the globe in a pattern so predictable that (this is the fun part) if you take a deep breath right now, at least one of the molecules entering your lungs literally came from Caesar's last breath.
