Quotation

Storm in a Teacup

the Physics of Everyday Life
Our bodies are immense machines; even a single cell might contain a billion molecules, and there are around 10 million million (10^13) cells in our body. We need impressive signalling and transport systems to coordinate all these constituent parts, and that coordination takes time. No human has ‘lightning reactions’, because the cost of our wonderful complexity is the huge amount of time it takes us to get anything done. The shortest time that we can appreciate is approximately the blink of an eye (about a third of a second), but in that time millions of proteins have been built inside us and billions of ions have diffused across our nerve synapses, while the simpler world outside our bodies has just been getting on with things.