The Immensity of Avogadro's Number

Avogadro's Number is an immense number. How big is this number?

Here are a few estimates:

If you count out loud starting with the number "one" at the rate of one count every second, it may take you about 1,909,577,942,668,696 years to finish. This is roughly 960,000 times the estimated lifetime of our universe (assuming 20 Billion years).

Using a Pentium 450 MHz CPU, it will still take about 4,243,506 years to finish this task. This is a period of time about a thousand times longer than the total span of our civilization.

If marbles that have a diameter of one centimeter were to be lined up end-to-end in a straight line, the distance covered by this string of marbles can hold in about 500,000,000 of our Solar System placed end-to-end.

If we can't quite count that high in the human life span, can we estimate its value?

 

 

[ Home| ModuleMap| Tips |Glossary ]