How heavy is air? - Dan Quinn

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Too often we think of air as empty space — but compared to a vacuum, air is actually pretty heavy. So, just how heavy is it? And if it's so heavy, why doesn't it crush us? Dan Quinn describes the fundamentals of air pressure and explains how it affects our bodies, the weather and the universe at large.

Lesson by Dan Quinn, animation by Sandro Katamashvili.

You may not realize it,

but from the moment you got out of bed today

to the point where you sat down to watch this video,

you've essentially been swimming.

Why? Because air is a fluid just like water.

It has waves and eddies.

It flows.

And when you push air out of the way,

it rushes around you into a wake.

So why don't we notice it most of the time?

We commonly think of air as empty space.

But while one cubic centimeter of interstellar space,

the volume in the tip of your pinky finger,

contains roughly one atom,

the same volume of air has about 10 quintillion molecules.

If that sounds hard to wrap your head around,

it happens to be about the same

as the number of insects alive on the planet,

all crawling, climbing, and flying over each other

in an enormous, tightly packed swarm.

When this swarm of molecules runs into things,

it exerts a force, pressing against the boundaries of the fluid,

like water pressing against the glass of a bottle.

This is known as air pressure.

And while air is lighter than water,

all those molecules still get pretty heavy,

with the total air filling a typical school gym,

weighing about as much as an adult elephant.

So when you walk into a gym,

how come you're not immediately crushed

by the elephant of air in the room?

Well, first of all,

because most of it is pressing on the floor and the walls,

and the part that is pressing on you

is pushed back by the pressure inside you!

You see, the air, as well as the water and everything else,

that fills our bodies exerts an amount of pressure

equal to that of the air outside.

Of course, this is no accident.

It's precisely what allows us to survive

in the normal atmosphere,

and what makes it more difficult

at high altitudes or deep water.

And we normally don't feel the air pressing on us

because it's generally uniform.

So even though different amounts of air molecules

are hitting you at different times,

the swarm is so thick

that all those little differences average out.

What happens when air pressure isn't uniform?

This means that the molecules are pushing harder

in one region of air than another,

driving the air flow from the higher pressure region

to the lower.

We feel this flow directly as wind,

and the pressure systems

that meteorologists are always going on about

are responsible for other weather changes,

from the mundane to the catastrophic.

But differences in air pressure

do more than just let us complain about the weather;

they're the very reason we're alive.

We breathe by lowering the pressure in our lungs,

allowing air to rush in.

So the next time you take a deep breath,

think of the unfathomable number of air molecules

you're commanding to move.

We look up at the night sky

to ponder the infinity of space,

but unless you're watching this video

from that deep space,

there are more air molecules

in and around your body

than there are grains of sand in all the world's beaches and deserts,

stars in the visible universe,

or both of those numbers combined.

The vastness of the universe

is right in front of you

and inside you.