What is Avogadro’s number and why is it needed?

Have you ever thought about the vastness of the Universe that surrounds us? On a microscopic scale, everything exists far beyond what our eyes can see. the world of particles and molecules that give shape to everything we know, from the air we breathe to the objects we touch. What if we could count these tiny particles and quantify them? Well, although this may seem completely fantastic, it is not, and Avogadro’s number is a fundamental factor for this.

Represented by letters N_TOHe Avogadro’s number It is a quantity that tells us how many particles are contained in a mole of any substance, thus becoming one of the most important tools for understanding the world at the molecular level. And although this is not one of the most famous personalities mathematics or physics (surely the golden ratio or the number “pi” seem much more familiar to you) Avogadro’s constant is also positioned as fundamental element without which many branches of these disciplines would not even exist.

WHAT IS AVOGADRO’S NUMBER?

Thus, Avogadro’s constant is a quantity that provides an important connection between mass and the number of particles in a substance. In technical language this is defined as number of constituent particles, whether atoms or molecules, which are contained in a mole – a mole of a substance is its atomic mass in grams – of any substance; but simply put, we can say that Avogadro’s number tells us how many particles exists in a certain quantity, regardless of its type and nature.

The currently accepted value of Avogadro’s constant is 6.02214087(62)x10.²³ – that is, six hundred two thousand two hundred fourteen trillion seventy-six thousand billion particles, a figure far greater than the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. And be careful, because Avogadro’s number has no units. That is, it can technically be used for tell me something, as if we were talking about a hundred or a dozen. However, this is such a huge number that it is only applicable to small objects such as atoms or molecules.

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CONSTANT NAILING

The first to realize this constancy of particles in certain quantities of matter was the Italian scientist Amadeo Avogadro. This chemist was born in Turin in 1776, at a time when chemistry began to separate from alchemy and become a modern science. In 1811, he formulated a hypothesis that consolidated this transformation: he stated that Equal volumes of gases under the same conditions of temperature and pressure contained the same number of molecules.. That is, it implied that the molar mass of any substance must contain a fixed number of atoms or particles, regardless of their type.

As is often the case with all revolutionary ideas, Avogadro’s postulate was accepted with approval. skepticism, negativity And confusion. Part of the controversy arose from the lack of distinction between atoms and molecules, as these concepts were still evolving. On the other hand, Dalton’s atomic theory, a contemporary of Avogadro’s proposal, focused on atoms as the fundamental units of matter and did not consider elements such as molecules composed of several atoms.

In fact, Avogadro did not see his theory accepted during his lifetime. And only after his death, in 1856, and with the development of the kinetic theory of gases, his hypothesis began to gain recognition. Thus, over the years, technological advances and experimental techniques have allowed us to refine the definition of Avogadro’s constant, leading the scientific community to recognize its importance in physics and chemistry.

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NOBEL ROOM PER ROOM

In particular, the recognition of the constant in the years after Avogadro’s death was so significant that it became the subject of a Nobel Prize in 1926. French physicist became the winner Jean Baptiste Perrinwhich was awarded for the argument “for his work on the dissolution of matter and especially for his discovery of the laws governing the motion of particles in suspension, work which was directly related to Avogadro’s constant and his study of atoms and molecules“

But this award was more than deserved: Perrin played a fundamental role in the precise definition and definition of Avogadro’s number, establishing reasons to connect solar masses of substances with the amounts of particles present in them

. His work was instrumental in confirming Avogadro’s proposal and assigning a number to his hypothetical constant. He even named the figure after the Italian scientist instead of his own as a sign of respect.

In addition to Perrin, other scientists have made significant contributions to the field over the years. defining and understanding Avogadro’s constant, although not all of them managed to achieve recognition from the French. However, the Nobel Prize was a way to highlight importance about this constant, somewhat more unknown, as one of the fundamental figures guiding the understanding of the world at the molecular level, paying tribute to the influence it has had on science and, indeed, on society as a whole.