Previous in Forum: Meta Moderation on CR4   Next in Forum: American Inventor: Tonight 8 PM (EST) on ABC
Close
Close
Close
Rate Comments: Nested
The Feature Creep

Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 990

Caesar's Last Breath

03/15/2006 11:51 AM

As today is the Ides of march I thought I'd share an old brainteaser called the "The Fermi Solution". The basic question is "When you take a single breath, how many molecules of gas you intake would have come from the dying breath of Caesar?"
Assuming that that the molecules which Caesar exhaled in his last breath have diffused evenly to the whole atmosphere and has not been converted or absorbed into other chemicals.
Here is a link with the answer.

__________________
"The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet." -William Gibson
Register to Reply
Interested in this topic? By joining CR4 you can "subscribe" to
this discussion and receive notification when new comments are added.
Power-User

Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 394
Good Answers: 1
#1

Caesars Last Breath

03/16/2006 10:28 AM

Assume he exhales about 1 quart of air or about .0025 lbs. 13.3 cu-ft/lb and roughly 30 quarts per cu-ft.

Total weight of atmosphere is 14.7 lb/sq-in times surface area of the Earth. 4 pi radius squared. gives about 1.15 E19 lbs.

Atomic weight of air is about 29 (mostly diatomic nitrogen)

Avogradros number is 2.73 E26 molecules/lb-mole

Caesar exhales about 2.26 E22 molecules

1 lb of air then contains about 1,960 molecules of the air Caesar exhaled.

Assuming 1 quart of air is inhaled, then the number of molecules one would inhale that Caesar exhaled would be around 5.

Register to Reply
Register to Reply

Previous in Forum: Meta Moderation on CR4   Next in Forum: American Inventor: Tonight 8 PM (EST) on ABC

Advertisement