ATOMS: Smaller Than Small!

Atoms are unimaginably tiny pieces if matter.

Here is one way to think about the size of an atom:

When you dot an “i” with a No. 2 pencil, you will have placed more than a thousand billion carbon atoms onto the paper! And the paper you wrote on - over one million atoms in thickness! Even the most powerful microscopes in the world cannot allow scientists to see individual atoms! Yet we have definitive proof of their existence.

Interestingly enough, counting atoms is easier than you might think.

All you need is a sample of matter, the right reference table, a balance, and a calculator.

A piece of charcoal that you could hold in your hand, with a mass of only 12 grams, is made up of 6.02214 x 10^23 carbon atoms!

That’s 602,214,000,000,000,000,000,000 carbon atoms in 12 grams of charcoal.

Just don’t ask me to write it in words – its 'billions of trillions' of atoms.

A chemistry student would use a different word to express the number: one “mole” of atoms!