Moles

Early proponents of the concept of an ‘atom’ would have been surprised to learn just how small that basic building block can be.

Avogadro came up with a unit to count atoms, or molecules, and he called it a mole.

• One dozen contains 12 items.
• One mole contains items.

(aside work to give a perspective of the size of a atom)

(we may be deleting this–the problem could be “bad” for raising to many questions that have to be answered before the problem can be solved)

Hydrogen is the smallest atom. We can separate the hydrogen and oxygen we get when we subject water to Electrolysis, but we can’t keep the hydrogens as individual atoms. They readily combine with each other to form , a molecule of two hydrogens bonded together.

But, let’s go ahead and take the volume of a hydrogen atom and see how it compares to the volume a cubic meter.

A hydrogen atom has a volume of about 6.2 × 10-31 cubic meters.