October 23 – Mol Day, Happy Day for Chemists!

A mole is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities of the International System of Units that measures the amount of substance. It contains exactly 6.02214078 x 1023 elemental entities. This figure is known as Avogadro's constant although he never knew of the existence of this particular number. In fact, his main contribution to Chemistry was Avogadro's law that dictates that "two equal volumes of two different gases, at the same temperature and pressure, should have the same number of particles".

It was later, Jean Perrin, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1926, based on the work of Avogadro, proposed this concept based on the study of the magnitudes of substances at the atomic and molecular level.

When talking about moles, in general, it is said that they are elemental entities and what does this mean? Well, 1 mole of molecules contains 6.02214078 x 1023 molecules and 1 mole of sugar cubes will contain 6.02214078 x 1023 sugar cubes, which would be 2,408,885,631,200,000,000 tons. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this quantity, it is approximately 1/30 of the mass of the moon. So if we take 30 moles of sugar land we will have 1 moon made of sugar.

Why is it celebrated today? Because it is the 23rd of the 10th month and the prime time is 6:02, which, using the Saxon designation of dates, is written 6:02 10/23, much like Avogadro's number.