“We are made of atoms. With each breath you inhale a million billion billion atoms of oxygen, which gives some idea of how small each one is. All of them, together with the carbon atoms in your skin, and indeed everything else on Earth, were cooked in a star some 5 billion years ago. So you are made of stuff that is as old as the planet, one-third as old as the universe, though this is the first time that those atoms have been gathered together such that they think that they are you.” UniversePhysicsExistance Book:Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduction Source: Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduction
“Alpha sets the scale of nature -- the size of atoms and all things made of them, the intensity and colors of light, the strength of magnetism, and the metabolic rate of life itself. It controls everything that we see. ... In 137, apparently, science had found Nature's PIN Code.” SciencePhysicsFine Structure Constant Book:The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe Source: The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe