How big is a mole? Help me put moles in perspective, like how much space would a mole of bowling ball occupy?

How big is a mole? Help me put moles in perspective, like how much space would a mole of bowling ball occupy? How many times would a mole of 5 ft people stacked head to toe stretch around the earth?





Can you show the dimensional analysis set up you used to get the answer, thanks for your help!

How big is a mole? Help me put moles in perspective, like how much space would a mole of bowling ball occupy?
It would take 4 moles to fill a coffee cup.
Reply:my teacher explained the mole in terms of marshmallow's. if you had one mole of marshmallow's you could cover the whole of Australia and the layer would be over 1Km thick. hope that helps
Reply:A mole is avogadro number of molecules. That is ~6 * 10^23 molecules. If the bowling balls are in cubic packing, and they are 1 ft in diam, then there are cubert(600)*10^7 balls on a side in a mole, and they fill a cube 8.4*10^7 ft on a side or 15900 miles on a side.





A mole of 5-ft people end-to-end is 30*10^23 ft long. The circumference of the earth at the equator is 2*π*4000 miles, or 1.3*10^8 ft. The number of times would be 30*10^23 / 1.3*10^8 = 2.3*10^16 times.
Reply:The concept of mole is seldom applied to macroscopic objects, because it is a very large number. A mole of atoms or molecules is 6.023E23 of them, a mole of people would occupy a hundred trillion worlds with the population density that the earth now has.
Reply:Avogadro's Number is often approximated at 6.02 x 10^23. Logarithmically that's almost 10^24, meaning a cube 10^8 (one hundred million) on each side would have a volume of about a mole.





If you want to be more accurate, 1 mole = 0.602x10^24. The cube root of 0.602 is 0.844, so 1 mole = (0.844x10^8)^3 =


(8.44x10^7)^3 = a cube 84.4 million on each side.





A standard US bowling ball is 8.6 inches in diameter. If you made a cubical lattice of bowling balls (let's not quibble about more efficient packing schemes) then each side of the cube would have a length of:





(8.6 inches/ball)(8.44x10^7 balls/side)(1 foot/12 inches)(1 mile/5280 feet) = 11,455 miles/side.





Since the Earth is only some 8000 miles in diameter, this cube of bowling balls is noticeably bigger than the Earth!





You can use my methods to compute other wacky statistics such as you suggested.