Happy Mole Day!

So the chemist in me comes out: it's mole day! A mole is essentially a really really big number, and a convenient way of counting atoms (which after all are really really small). Since a mole is 6.022 x 10^23, Mole Day starts at 6:02 am on October 23rd.


How big is a mole? I'm glad you asked!

• If there were a mole of rice grains, all the land area in the whole world would be covered with rice to a depth of about 75 meters.
• One mole of rice grains is more grains than all the grain that has been grown since the beginning of time.
• A mole of marshmallows would cover the United States to a depth of 600 miles
• A mole of hockey pucks would be equal to the mass of the Moon.

• Assuming that each human being has 60 trillion body cells (6.0 x 10¹³) and the Earth's population is 6 billion (6 x 10⁹), the total number of living human body cells on the Earth at the present time is 3.6 x 10²³or a little over half of a mole.
• If one mole of pennies were divided up among the Earth's population, each person would receive 1 x 10¹⁴ pennies. Personal spending at the rate of one million dollars a day would use up each persons wealth in about three thousand years. Life would not be comfortable because the surface of the Earth would be covered in copper coins to a depth of at least 400 meters.
• If you had a mole of pennies and wanted to buy kite string at the rate of a million dollars per inch, you would get your money's worth. After stretching your string around the Earth one million times, and to the Moon and back twenty-five times, you would have enough string left over to sell back at a dollar an inch (a decided loss) to gain enough money to buy every man, woman and child in the US a $50,000 automobile and enough gasoline to run it at 55 mph for a year. After those purchases, you would still have enough money left over to give every man, woman, and child in the whole world about $5000.

Basis for calculations:

Earth's circumference = 25,000 miles
Distance to moon = 240,000 miles
Cost of gasoline = $2.50 per gallon
Gasoline mileage = 20 miles per gallon
U.S. population = 220,000,000
World population = 6,000,000,000

Another chemistry funny: