Potential Einsteins Celebrate World Mole Day

A Mole Learns About Chemistry

From 6:02 a.m to 6:02 p.m. on Oct. 23 people the world over will commemorate Avogadro’s Number, which is 6.02×10²³, or simply a “mole” if you prefer.

Why? To enthuse people, especially students, about the mysterious world of chemistry.

This year’s theme is “Moles of the Round Table.”

Apart from singing, you’re allowed to make strange jokes like: “What happens when a mole bites a dog? … He becomes Moleicious!” Or to make strange treats like Moleasses cookies, Avogadro Dip, or Taco-mole sauce … all in the name of science!

So how did this all come about? It all started with a little epistle for a get-everyone-interested-in-chemistry-day article in “The Science Teacher” in the 1980s, which led to the foundation of the National Mole Day Foundation in 1991.

Since 2003, being creative (and slightly silly) may even earn you the “National Mole of the Year” Award, presented at the ChemEd Conferences. The award goes to someone who has “contributed the most to furthering the cause of Mole Day and chemistry education,” according to the website of the National Mole day Foundation.

Anyway, moles are key to understanding matter. If you know how to use them and you have a periodic table handy, you can convert the number of atoms and molecules to grams, or vice versa, for any known substance. And this is important if you need to know how many particles a certain substance contains, which might react with another substance’s active parts.

So, using moles, the mass of a substance expressed in grams is exactly the same as its molar mass. For example, the molar mass of water is 18.015, and one mole of water is 18.015 grams.

Where most people would say, “Here I have 36.03 grams of water,” (and then drink it), chemists could simply say, “Let me see where I put my 2 moles of water and the other x-number of moles of the thing I need to make it glow/explode/etc.”

Before 1909, when physics Nobel Prize winner Jean Perrin determined the Avogadro constant, scientists might have referred to that same bit of water as: “12.04×10²³ molecules of water.”

Perrin named the convenient constant the “Avogadro constant” in honor of Amedeo Avogadro, who proposed a century earlier that there might be a relationship between the volume of a gas and the number of atoms or molecules in it.