Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Describing a mole of atoms and 10 nm

The purpose of this post is to describe 10 nm and 1 mole of atoms.

10 nanometers is a tiny measurement.  A human hair is 40,000 nanometers wide and if we blew that size up to the size of an airsoft bb, which is 1/2 a centimeter wide, that would stretch it out to 20,000 centimeters which would stretch halfway around a running track.

1 mole of atoms is the number of atoms it takes to create a certain weight.  Say you took a penny and a quarter and tried to weigh them on a bathroom scale.  You can't do that effectively so instead you take 1,000 quarters and 1,000 pennies and weighed them on the bathroom scale.  You can see a different weight for each of those weights.  1 mole equals the weight of both the pennies and the quarters at that selected number.

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