this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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freedom units be like (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by bi_tux to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No it's simply a big number. We are stuck with it due to history, but at its core it's a dimensionless quantity. You can do every single calculation without moles. Sure, yo may have to adjust some constants (boltzman constant vs gas constant for example), but it's not a unit in the same sense a meter or a second is.

[โ€“] batmaniam 1 points 1 year ago

I don't know exactly what you'd call it, but respectfully, it's not just a big number.

Ignoring other isotopes (which, all you need to do to adjust for that is use the weighted average), if you have 12 grams of carbon, 63 of copper, etc you will have 6.02E23 molecules of each. The value is implied by the fact that again, atoms have a consistent mass and react in integer quantities. A mol could have been any value, but that's like saying that a meter could have been as well. The existence of some value that marries the atomic mass of each element to a quantity of atoms is inherit the same way pi is inherit to a circle.