Talk:Mole (unit)/Archive 1

message: why is it called a mole??—Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.49.80.29 (talk • contribs) 03:19, 22 October 2002 (UTC)
thread_title: Etymology

message: Why does the article use the term ".012 kg"?  Wouldn't it be more logical to state that as "12 g"? Nik42 08:54, 26 January 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: "The author" was the CGPM, which used that terminology in its semiofficial English version of resolution officialy defining the unit, and in the offical French version too with French spelling of unit and comma decimal point.  It is followed by the BIPM in its SI brochure, and by NIST in SP 811.  Well, all of them, as this article did too, actually use the leading zero before the decimal fraction.  Nonetheless, I agree that it should be "12 grams".  Gene Nygaard 08:49, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  .012 kg? 

message: Wikipedia is better than a normal encyclopedia for many reasons. One of them is that it is easy to understand for the normal person (as it is written and/or edited by normal people). Let's help keep it comprehensible. Avogadro's number, the number which the whole concept of the mole is based upon, is big. Really really big. Enormously big. Way too big to actually comprehend. But we can get an idea of it with some good examples, which also make the article a bit more interesting. 1023, like I said, is unbeleviably huge, but if you don't already know about it, it's just a couple of numbers.
Anyway, my chemistry textbook has two examples to help comprehend the size of the number. The first one is that if you took a mole of sand, it would cover the city of Los Angeles (or something) in 600 meters of sand. The second example is that if you had a mole of rice, it would weigh as much as a million cars for every person on earth. Now, when you read these, you are probabably amazed by how much that is, but you don't get any farther than that. You don't actually get a grasp on how big it is, just that it's really really big. A million cars for every person on earth? No idea how much that is. If, however, you modified the first example, it would work. Get a picture of a single grain of sand among many, show how small it is. Then, get a picture of the city of Los Angeles or whatever it is, an aerial view, and show how much 600 meters would be. That would help a lot.
I'm willing to help, in fact I'll put together the picture, if people agree with me, and if someone can do the calculations to verify the facts (I may have remembered the specifics wrong). Twilight Realm 03:19, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I haven't done the calculation, but I remember it to the effect of "a mole of sand grains (or maybe rice) would cover Earth a few meters deep."  The problem with this is, 'who can actually understand and appreciate the size of Earth?' - BeastRHIT 06:34, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

text: Avogadro's Number is very big, but it doesn't even come close to googol.--Jack 02:10, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Examples 

message: like saying thousand? you could say "a mole of cats" right? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 161.76.99.106 (talk • contribs) 00:25, 6 May 2006  (UTC)
:That's way too many cats! But, basically yes - it is a specifically defined number or quantity in the metric system. Vsmith 13:06, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  unit? isn't just a number? 

message: While to me, as a physicist, it seems sensible to say that the mole is unitless, it is pretty clear that the mole is defined as being dimensionful:  "Note that since N(X) is dimensionless, and n(X) has the SI unit mole, the Avogadro constant has the coherent SI unit reciprocal mole."   That strikes me as being silly and arbitrary, and the fact that they have to state that the reciprocal mole is coherent implies that one's first thought is to assume it is incoherent.  But Wikipedia is not the place to rewrite the definitions of fundamental entities, so I guess the mole really does have units. Ckerr 18:59, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  It seems clear... 

message: Would someone who had $6.02x10^23 be called a Moleonaire? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.172.248.207 (talk • contribs) 10:43, August 14, 2006  (UTC)
:That would be one major counterfeiter --Blainster 20:22, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moleonaire? 

message: I received this response from an e-mail I sent to the BIPM:
: The mole is not currently regarded as a count and amount of substance is not considered as a dimensionless quantity, or quantity of dimension 1, mainly because the definition of the mole fixes the molar mass of Carbon 12 and is thus linked to the kilogram. It may be that in a few years the mole be re-defined using a fixed value of the Avogadro number. In such a case, its present link with the kilogram would relax and measuring amount of substance would reduce to a counting.
If the dimensionless mole's coffin was lacking any nails, it is certainly not now. Ckerr 12:26, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for your diligence on this. --Grouse 13:07, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  From BIPM itself 

message: The unit mol is not spelled mole, at all, ever, in the history of the world. Wow
:mol is the abbreviation, but the unit is called 'mole'.  --71.190.143.208 21:25, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Could this be the entomology for mole?    Sithkhan (talk) 22:34, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Mole? Seriously?

message: I'm not a chemist, but isn't the picture associated with this article ridiculously confusing?  Wouldn't it be easier to represent whatever this image shows with text?  It looks like it's saying that multiplying the moles by the mass of the constituents gives the mass.  Why do we need a crazy abstract art thing to show this?  Alex Dodge 06:18, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I never really looked at the diagram before, and when I did I couldn't quite make sense of it either.  It's nice to have a picture, but I think that one did more harm than good, so I've removed it. Ckerr 10:51, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What sort of image would be helpful? Grouse 11:07, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps a photograph of 0.012 kilograms of carbon-12?  For comparison, see the metre article and the kilogram article. Alex Dodge 02:05, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I actually already tried to look for that, but all the images I found were copywrited.  If you can find one, that would be great! Ckerr 07:20, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Diagram 

message: this page needs MAJOR REWORDING none of this makes sence and is accurate. 10:17, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  About the wording 

message: Substituted at 15:24, 1 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

message: You could read the entire article and still not understand what a mole is. Like, an encyclopedia is for people who don't know nothing to start with. Please, can we start with the definition I was taught in first year chemistry: "A mole is the atomic weight of an atom or molecule expressed in grams. Thus if the atomic weight of carbon is 12, then one mole of carbon is 12 grams. Avogadro's number is the number of atoms or molecules in a mole. Thus if carbon has atomic weight 12, one mole of carbon (12 grams) contains Avogadro's number of atoms."  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.207.137.134 (talk) 18:49, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: winning wikipedia editors suck . they stinks at explaining any thing and that is why they do it , because they are evil anti completion commies .  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.150.8.147 (talk) 08:52, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

text: * I hope this has been fixed now. --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 09:12, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Duh?

message: Some prankster added this to the article:
"Also, it was proven that Avogrado's number was stolen off another brilliant genius in Prasath Santhakumaran. In his time of death Avogrado said that it was true that he did steal the number off Prasath and that this shouldn't be told to anyone."
This is unsourced and, as far as I know, a joke in poor taste and tantamount to vandalism on its face. I am removing it forthwith. Its author deserves some sort of reprimand. Trujaman (talk) 21:28, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Prasath Santhakumaran

message: Apparently someone saw fit to undo the changes I made a few days ago to add a section to this article about other definitions of a mole (e.g., a kg-mol).  He/she claimed that these changes were inappropriate as "These are not definitions of the mole."  I must disagree:  I have had numerous students confused by the use of kg-mol and lb-mol in textbooks, primarily because they too thought there was only one way to define a mole.  Confusingly or otherwise, these definitions persist.
The term kg-mol is quite common among chemical engineers, and the lb-mol is even more common among chemical engineers from the USA.  Software designed to assist in chemical plant design, such as PRO/II and ASPEN, all include these units.  While these alternate definitions are rarely if ever seen outside the field of chemical engineering, their existence warrants at least being mentioned in an article dedicated to the definition of a mole.
Examples:
* M. S. Peters, K. Timmerhaus, and R. E. West, Plant Design and Economics for Chemical Engineers, Fifth Edition.  McGraw Hill (2002-2003).  [Uses kg-mol, written as such.]
* J. M. Douglas, Conceptual Design of Chemical Processes.  Boston:  McGraw Hill (1988).  [Uses lb-mol, written as mol, throughout.]
Kaiserkarl13 (talk) 21:46, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The pound-mole (also written without the hyphen) is a separate unit, although the link currently redirects here. The "kilogram-mole" is just an obsolescent name for the kilomole. Both of them are units of measurement of amount of substance that can be found in some US texts, but neither of them is the same unit as the mole. The confusion only arises if you pretend that they are. Physchim62 (talk) 22:12, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The fact that pound-moles and kilogram-moles are separate units but are still called moles was my point!  The fact that kilomoles and kilogram-moles are the same is a result of the fact that kilo(grams) and (kilograms) are the same, but the kg-mol is in no way an obsolete unit---it just happens to have the same meaning as a kmol and takes more characters to type.  The purpose of the added text is to point out that there is more than one definition of a mole---with the standard SI unit of a mole being defined in terms of the gram.  There's nothing pretend about it, though---the units kg-mol and lb-mol still occur, and they are no less valid as definitions of a mole.  They just aren't the ones associated with the SI definition of "the mole." Kaiserkarl13 (talk) 23:00, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

text: You'd never say that pounds are another way of defining grams, so why do you say that the pound-mole is another way of defining the mole? It's another way of defining a unit of amount of substance, yes, but there is no law that says that all units of amount of substance have to be called "moles": in fact, there is a good pedagogical case for pointing out the exact opposite! Physchim62 (talk) 23:14, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not contending that the specific unit referred to as the mole (i.e., the SI unit defined as the number of entities in 12 g of 12-C) is the same unit as a kilogram-mole---obviously it isn't.  The point of contention is that other units of amount of substance are invariably also called moles (with some modifier), perhaps merely due to lack of creativity.  An excellent example is the unfortunate use of pounds in the English Imperial System to refer to both units of force and mass (these are, of course, different but related units).  I think this point of contention could be settled by adding a section titled something like, "Units related to the mole" in which other units of amount of substance are defined.  This would have the advantage of clarifying that "the mole" (unit) and "a mole" (generic term for amount of substance, usually but not always referring to the SI unit) can be different things.  This would also solve the problem of pound-mole and kilogram-mole currently redirecting to Mole_(unit), which doesn't mention either of these other units.  I may write these articles at a later date when I have the time.  Kaiserkarl13 (talk) 21:35, 21 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Possibly this should be "Other units called mole" or something on those lines? That would make it clear that the lb-mole and kg-mole (both of which redirect here) are not actually the mole but rather something else with a confusingly similar name… I think I'll go add that.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sabik (talk • contribs) 16:15, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alternate mole definitions 

message: "(also, anachronistically, known as "Avogadro's number")" Wha-Huh?  "Anachonistically", chronologically out of order?  Does that mean that yesterday it was correct, but today it is not correct?  Maybe it means that it will be correct in 1.66 years.  I'm not asking if it is correct to call Avogadro's constant, Avogadro's number.  I'm asking what time has to do with it.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.5.226.78 (talk) 12:16, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: When it was first measured, it was assumend to be a pure number because people didn't stop to think that its value depends on the units used to measure amount of substance. Now it is generally accepted that amount of substance is a separate dimension in any practical system of macroscopic units of measurement, and so it is proper to call it the Avogadro constant to recognise the fact that it is not a pure number, but a physical constant with a unit (mol–1). Physchim62 (talk) 13:25, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: But now it is 2019, and Avogadro's constant will (soon) be defined as an integer number per mole, and so Avogadro's number an integer. They could have defined it as rational non-integer, an irrational number, or even a transcendental number. Gah4 (talk) 03:21, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chronologically? 

message: The radio advised me this morning that today is National Mole Day. Who’d have thought?
The mole is a wondrous thing, and easy to understand – as long as you realize it is just a number: 
* If you have a dozen eggs, you have 12 eggs.
* If you have a baker’s dozen of buns, you have 13 buns. 
* If you live a score of years, you live 20 years. 
* If you have a Groß (or gross) of hobbits you have a dozen-dozen, or 144 hobbits. 
* If you have a ream of paper, you have 500 sheets or paper 
* If you have a bale of paper you have 5000 sheets of paper
* If you have a Maß (or ‘great gross’) of tacks, you have a gross-gross (a dozen-dozen-dozen-dozen) or 1728 tacks. 
* If you have a Mole of atoms, you have 6.02 X 1023 atoms 
* If you have a nonillion freckles, you have 1030 (or perhaps 1054, depending upon where you live) freckles
* If you have googol of edits, you have 10100 edits. 
What could be simpler? 
But to the question: Is "National Mole Day" encyclopedic enough to be included in a Wikipedia article? 
Skål -  130.20.3.152 (talk) 16:37, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course, we even have an article about it: Mole Day. --Itub (talk) 14:57, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: National Mole Day

message: "The mole as a unit" is POV (and has a disputable match between content and heading):
The most blatant is the phrasing "The second misconception" referring to
something which could be taken both as true and as a matter of perspective.
This is the worse as the author borders on straw-manning by equating the
originally stated criticism "the mole is simply a shorthand way of referring to a large number" with "that the mole is simply a counting aid",
formulations that are not equivalent (albeit related).
Notably, the "second" also implies that the previously discussed item
is a misconception---which is equally disputable.
Looking more in detail on:
Claim 1: I must second that the mole is dimensionless and
it lacks the significance of e.g. the meter. (Notwithstanding that it may be justified as a unit.) It is better compared to %
(per cent): Handy and useful, but not truly significant. Further, it
is redundant when the mass and composition is known. The argumentation
against this is partially specious. The number of particles of the involved elements
can easily be computed when mass and composition are known (and, conversely,
knowing the number of particles and composition, the mass is easy to find).
Without knowing the composition, OTOH, the concept of moles would typically be useless. In effect, moles and the associated calculations are a handy help, but are still redundant. That the
number of moles can be found without knowledge of mass is irrelevant, because the number of moles and mass can always be found from each other when composition is known.
(There are some special cases where the equivalency fails, e.g. in relativistic conditions; however, the calculations can be adapted and mathematical equivalency of information is preserved. Further, while the ideal gas law may give some physical characteristics based on number of particles alone, these are of limited value, and more advanced models use characteristics other than particles alone, which require that composition, or other characteristics which lead to mass or possibly a mass surrogate, is known.)
Claim 2: Whether the mole is defined in terms of Avogadro's constant, or the other way around, is irrelevant. It is a short-hand for a large and arbitrary number. The other gains from using moles could be found by using the atomic weight directly. (With the exception of some handy approximative jumps from weight to number of moles when doing head calculations.)
In short: Apart from convenience, the mole has no advantage over the number of particles (as a "vanilla" number, just like 10 % has no advantage over 0.1). Apart from convenience, very little is gained from using moles instead of mass.
Michael Eriksson (talk) 13:29, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree that, while there may be some interesting points, it is presented in the form of an argument, not encyclopedic. Noloop (talk) 21:00, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV Section 

message: :The kilogram is the mass of exactly () unbound carbon-12 atoms at rest and in their ground state.
This seems a strange way to write it.  Is it really planned that the official definition will be written like this, rather than simply as 5.01845125 × 1025?  Any idea why? — Smjg (talk) 23:06, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: If you follow up the links in New SI definitions, you can see the full story. Martinvl (talk) 06:17, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

text: Is it accidental that Avogadro's number is divisible by three? Gah4 (talk) 19:26, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

text: It seems that it isn't.  I was looking at the number above, but it is actually , so not a multiple of three (or 12).  Gah4 (talk) 19:33, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  6.0221415 × 10<sup>23</sup> / 0.012? 

message: Definitions: Section 4 and 4.1 considering a new definition of the kilogram does not belong in this article on the mole, amount of substance - the section should be removed or rather moved to the kilogram page.  On the other hand it is proper to consider redefining the kilomole (kmol) as a basic SI unit rather than the mole.  I see no difficulty in doing this and retaining all the definitions of Avogadro's number (and others) as they are at present.  What it will do is make the basic SI definitions a coherent* set rather than include the odd man out, the mole.
* I note that Wikipedia doesn't contain this notion in its list of coherence definitions - I will endeavour to elucidate soon.
Scanrod (talk) 11:23, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: In what sense is the mole the "odd man out" at the minute? Physchim62 (talk) 11:40, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

text: I posted a link to the CGPM 2011: see resolution 1. I think we can now delete the section about the kilogram from the mole article. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 17:05, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

text: Kilogram section now removed per Scanrod's request. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 17:10, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Redefinition

message: Is there sometimes the mole confused with the molar mass in some sources by abuse of language?--86.125.160.200 (talk) 15:59, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: The equation is balanced as written. Vsmith (talk) 18:34, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusion 

message: This entry became largely moot after the redefinition of 2019-05-20. For practical purposes, one does not need such detail.  For "talmudic" accuracy, the amu is now an experimental measurement while a mole is an exact number of particles. --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 09:28, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deletion of molar mass - atomic mass ratio demonstration 

message: two basic units are named after scientists; A[mpere] and Ke[lvin], so what if this ambiguous name labeled after Jons Jacob the Be[rzel]. and mmol and Kmol can be mBe and KBe. and a katal would be Be/sec
Tabascofernandez (talk) 00:19, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  name acquire  

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thread_title:  External links modified (February 2018) 

message: An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect 6.022. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so.  signed, Rosguill talk 22:05, 11 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  6.022 listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: I presume this will eventually be updated to the new definition, but it seems to me that, for just about all ordinary chemistry, it doesn't change anything.  One still gets out the periodic table, adds up the atomic mass of all the constituents, and measures out (avoiding the word weigh) the appropriate amount. Common laboratory balances aren't precise enough to make a difference. Seems to me that, now that there is a difference, the article should explain it. Gah4 (talk) 19:21, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The change is of interest for huge amount of students which learns the concept in college/Gymnasium etc. But correct, it do not have practical consequences. Christian75 (talk) 16:15, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  change 

message: There is in this article a link to elemental formula.  I didn't follow the history, but either the link, or the redirect, is wrong.  I believe that either or both formula mass and formula weight are more appropriate for the discussion here, though neither are discussed in the article.  As noted, formula mass/weight makes sense when the actual unit isn't a molecule.  I suppose ionic solids in gas form might form such molecules, but that normally isn't important. For polymers, the actual molecules are much larger, and formula mass/weight makes more sense when discussing them.  That is especially true for copolymers, where the molecules used to generate them are different. Gah4 (talk) 16:29, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Any more thoughts on this?  There is no good discussion, as far as I know, for formula mass and formula weight, specifically for things like ionic crystals.  The redirects aren't so good as they could be. Gah4 (talk) 18:08, 21 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[elemental formula]] 

message: Since I can technically use grams in the same measurement where I could use moles (like in blood tests some labs use grams some moles). Is their a guide as to when to use which? Jake9wi (talk) 21:41, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  When should moles be used? 

message: Mole is considered as seventh basic S.I unit of the amount of the substance. In Latin the word 'mole 'means heap or pile 160.238.74.104 (talk) 05:31, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mole concept