Q. If I had a dollar bill for every atom in a one-dollar bill, would I be richer than Bill Gates?

S.V.

Revere

A. This wonderful fantasy would indeed make you richer than Dollar Bill Gates, who, according to Fortune Magazine has been the richest person on Earth four years in a row.

Based strictly on his publicly registered holding of 500,777,800 shares of Microsoft, (according to the CNN FN network) Gates was worth $64,068,259,787 last Monday. We'll call it $64.07 billion for short. Since Microsoft stock went public in 1986, he has made $96 million a week.

That makes him worth 50 percent more than all the gold in Fort Knox. He could fund NASA for nearly five years. He could buy every team in all four major professional sports leagues in America with just one quarter of his wealth.

But even Bill Gates wouldn't match your wealth, S.V. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing says a dollar bill weighs .032 troy ounces. We don't know precisely what a dollar bill is made of, but it's mostly paper, which is largely cellulose.

MIT physicist Walter Lewin says that based on the molecular weight of cellulose there are approximately 80 billion trillion atoms in a dollar bill. That works out to: 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Just for fun, we calculated how rich you'd be if you had a dollar for every atom just in the black ink on the front of the dollar bill, and the green ink on the back (that's why they call them greenbacks).

The .06 grams of black ink has 3.75 billion trillion atoms. The .05 grams of green ink has 3.125 billion trillion atoms. Lewin cautions that these are gross estimates based on some informed estimates about the atomic structure and molecular weights of the paper and ink of a dollar bill.

But even if they are way off, a dollar for every atom in a dollar bill would be enough to make even Bill Gates green with envy.