I randomly had a thought in my head and now im curious, how do scientists know that atleast trillions of molecules in let’s say a water bottle is an accurate number? Because its says that it is a factual statement but how did they get to the point where they knew it was actually atleast in the trillions Thanks.
Edit: thank you so much for the answers guys!! 🙂
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There are ways to figure out *exactly* how much a single molecule weighs.
So then you just weigh the entire bottle, divide by the weight of a single molecule, and you get the amount of molecules.
1 cubic centimetre of water holds 3.345 x 10^(22) molecules of water.
That’s 33,450,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules (read as thirty-three sextillion, four-hundred-and-fifty quintillion). In the space less than a 6-sided dice.
So saying that a 1 litre bottle of water holds trillions of molecules, while technically correct, is misleading.
1 litre of water is 1000 cubic cms, so that’s 3.345 x 10^(25) or
33,450,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules, or thirty-three septillion, four-hundred-and-fifty sextillion.
Early on, when the atom was just getting theorized, chemists would compare weights of all substances to Hydrogen, and eventually we were able to determine the weights of each atom of an element (they’re on the order of around a 10^-24 g), and from that, molecules. We know how much a molecule of a substance weighs, and we know how much something of that substance weighs, so it’s very easy to guesstimate
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