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Is it coincidence that the number of Avogadro makes moles, and a number of avocados make guacamole?
(Insert a gif of that guy on the History Channel talking about aliens and saying "Is such a thing possible?" here.)
This question comes from a friend posting a photo of an avocado with "6.022*1023" written on it, and this all naturally leads to the question of how much guacamole is a mole of guacamole, anyway?
Avocados are mostly made out of water and organic molecules, and for a back-of-the-envelope handwave we can ignore the rest -- and if we figure that most of the organic mass is fairly large molecules which won't add much to the total molecule count, we can ignore them too. An avocado is about three-quarters water, and a mole of water is 18 milliliters, so that gives us about 24 milliliters of avocado. Round that down a little to account for the things we ignored.
With a unit conversion, that means a mole of guacamole is about a tablespoon and a half, plus or minus a bit of lime juice and salt.
So, while an Avogadro is one mole, a good-sized avocado is more like ten moles. I am disappoint.
(I thought a small furry underground rodent might be closer, and they are, but a typical one is still around four or five moles. We shall have to content ourselves with the knowledge that a typical beaver is roughly a kilomole.)
(Insert a gif of that guy on the History Channel talking about aliens and saying "Is such a thing possible?" here.)
This question comes from a friend posting a photo of an avocado with "6.022*1023" written on it, and this all naturally leads to the question of how much guacamole is a mole of guacamole, anyway?
Avocados are mostly made out of water and organic molecules, and for a back-of-the-envelope handwave we can ignore the rest -- and if we figure that most of the organic mass is fairly large molecules which won't add much to the total molecule count, we can ignore them too. An avocado is about three-quarters water, and a mole of water is 18 milliliters, so that gives us about 24 milliliters of avocado. Round that down a little to account for the things we ignored.
With a unit conversion, that means a mole of guacamole is about a tablespoon and a half, plus or minus a bit of lime juice and salt.
So, while an Avogadro is one mole, a good-sized avocado is more like ten moles. I am disappoint.
(I thought a small furry underground rodent might be closer, and they are, but a typical one is still around four or five moles. We shall have to content ourselves with the knowledge that a typical beaver is roughly a kilomole.)