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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?
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