Seventeen particles, one room — yours
I'm not a physicist — that's the point. The method, run where I hold no credential. Every number computes in your browser; every derivation is shown below.
The chart — everything you are is generation one · click any tile
The instruments — in your browser, from your clock; nothing leaves your tab
What's raining through you right now?
Born 15 km up, 2.2 μs to live — dead in 660 m, by the math. From your seat they arrive because their clocks tick slow; from the muon's seat its clock is fine — it's the atmosphere that length-contracts to a few hundred meters. Two stories, one arrival: that agreement is special relativity. Its heavier sibling, the tau, never makes it.
You are a decay engine.
Potassium-40 and carbon-14 decay inside you, every second of your life. Harmless — a night beside another human adds ~0.05 μSv. You have always been a source.
What's pouring through your thumbnail?
Born νe in the Sun's core, gone instantly — the light beside them takes 100,000 years to get out. By your thumbnail the river is all three flavors: Davis was "wrong" for 30 years, until oscillation proved neutrinos have mass — the Standard Model's first crack. One river, three slots, honestly.
The oldest light is in the room with you.
The cosmic microwave background: 13.8 billion years in flight, arriving from every direction — famously, roughly a percent of analog static. Its discoverers spent a year blaming pigeons; the hiss stayed. Ruling out is the method.
Your mass is mostly trapped energy.
Zoom from your body to the inside of a proton. The quarks' own masses cover barely 1% — the rest is the energy of confinement. Nuclear binding energy subtracts; confinement traps. Trapped energy weighs.
Met by their work · honestly never — one true thing each
Forcing "it's in your room" onto these would be a lie. The absence is the story — but every absence gets its one true thing.
The arithmetic — how we know, in five short sums
Why any muon reaches you at all
At rest a muon lives τ = 2.2 μs — at light speed that is a range of
c·τ = 3×10⁸ m/s × 2.2×10⁻⁶ s ≈ 660 m
far short of the ~15 km of atmosphere. But a typical ~4 GeV sea-level muon carries γ = E/mc² ≈ 4000/105.7 ≈ 38, so from your frame its clock runs 38× slow: range ≈ 38 × 660 m ≈ 25 km. From the muon's frame the same γ contracts the 15 km of sky to ~400 m. Both frames predict arrival — that agreement is the theory.
inputs: PDG muon mass 105.7 MeV, mean sea-level muon energy ~4 GeV, flux ~1 /cm²·min
Your ~7,400 Bq, from scratch
A 70 kg body holds ~140 g potassium (0.2% of mass). K-40 is 0.0117% of that: 16 mg → N ≈ 2.5×10²⁰ atoms. With half-life 1.25 Gy:
A = N·ln2/t½ ≈ 2.5×10²⁰ × 0.693 / (3.9×10¹⁶ s) ≈ 4,400 Bq
Carbon-14 (1.2 parts per trillion of your ~16 kg carbon, t½ 5,730 y) adds ~3,000 Bq. Total ≈ 7,400 decays every second — about 106 per kg, which is what the slider computes.
inputs: UNSCEAR body composition; K-40 t½ 1.25×10⁹ y; C-14 t½ 5,730 y
65 billion through every cm², from sunlight alone
The pp chain releases 26.7 MeV and exactly 2 neutrinos per helium made. The Sun's power is 3.8×10²⁶ W, so it must emit
2 × 3.8×10²⁶ / 4.3×10⁻¹² J ≈ 1.8×10³⁸ ν/s
Spread over a sphere of radius 1 AU (4πr² ≈ 2.8×10²⁷ cm²): ≈ 6.5×10¹⁰ per cm² per second. You can derive the flux from nothing but the solar constant — the detection story is the hard part, and it's why the "how many stopped inside you?" answer built Super-Kamiokande.
inputs: solar luminosity 3.8×10²⁶ W; pp-chain 26.7 MeV; 1 AU = 1.5×10¹³ cm
411 ancient photons per cm³
A blackbody at temperature T holds a fixed photon density. For the CMB's measured T = 2.725 K:
n = (2ζ(3)/π²) (kT/ħc)³ ≈ 411 photons/cm³
No fitting, no cosmology dial — one measured temperature in, one room-filling number out. The "about a percent of analog static" claim is looser: it depends on the receiver, which is why the page hedges it.
inputs: COBE/FIRAS T = 2.725 K; ζ(3) ≈ 1.202
The 1% quark, 99% glue budget
A proton weighs 938.3 MeV. Its three valence quarks weigh
2×m(u) + m(d) ≈ 2×2.2 + 4.7 ≈ 9.1 MeV ≈ 1%
The other ~99% is QCD binding — confinement energy, carried by the gluon field. Nuclear binding energy makes nuclei lighter than their parts; confinement makes the proton heavier than its quarks. Different signs, both "trapped energy weighs."
inputs: PDG quark masses (MS-bar); proton mass 938.272 MeV
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