Today is Mole Day! This isn't small cylindrical mammal appreciation day, it's a day to commemorate a basic unit in chemistry. A mole is defined as the number equal to the number of carbon atoms in exactly 12 grams of pure carbon-12. What is that number? It's 6.02214179 x 1023 and is commonly referred to as Avogadro's Number, after the 19th century scientist Amedeo Avogadro.
If you had a mole of M&Ms, you'd have 6.02214179 x 1023 M&Ms - plenty of M&Ms to get through all 12 seasons of Murder, She Wrote. Now, if you had a mole of dollars...
You could pay off the US national debt and not notice the difference...
1 mole of dollars: $602,214,179,000,000,000,000,000
US national debt: $19,739,152,000,000*
If you spent a billion dollars a second, it would take you over 19 million years to spend a mole of dollars.
A mole is a big number. A big number routinely used to quantify tiny things like atoms, compounds, or molecules. We can fit a mole of some well-known elements into petri dishes...
It looks like there are different amounts of each element present. There are AND there are not. Image having a mole of Dachshund and a mole of Great Danes. You'd have ~6.02 x 1023 of each dog, but your mole of Dachshunds and your mole of Great Danes would take up different amounts of space and have different masses.
A mole is like a chemist's version of a dozen. Now imagine if you had a mole of donuts.... nomnomnom
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*An ever changing value. Value estimated this morning at ~8:38AM CST on 24 October 2016. When this post was first written, the national date was about 2 trillion less.
Dr. Evil image is from Netbook News
Dog image from Examiner
[...] As Rooke points out, this calculation is easily done using the information provided (i.e. loss of gold is 3.66 g - 3.49 g = 0.17 g), the atomic weight of gold (Au), and Avogadro's number. [...]
I prefer Mole Day the Mexican delicious sauce.