Happy Mole Day!

Today is a day of celebration for chemistry folks called mole day.  The mole is a very specific number in chemistry and it is how chemists count and bundle atoms and molecules.

How many in a mole?  There are 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles.  Normally we try to write it like this 6.02 X 10²³.

For perspective:

• There is a one mole of water molecules in about 2 tablespoons.

• One mole of copy paper would stretch from the earth to the sun over a million times.

• One mole of pennies would fill in the all the space between the earth and the moon's orbit in stacks of 400 pennies.

• One mole of pennies would be enough to give everyone on the face of the earth about 1 trillion dollars.

Sometimes we forget how small atoms and molecules are.  Hopefully this puts atomic size into perspective

Happy Mole Day!