Avogadro Goes to Court

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Abstract

This case study was inspired by a successful lawsuit brought by students against a professor at Pace University who had assigned them the task of calculating the cost of a single aluminum atom in a roll of aluminum foil. The case deals with the concepts of Avogadro’s number and the mole, and so would be relevant to nearly all introductory level science courses including chemistry courses for non-science majors, general science courses, and, perhaps, some introductory level biology courses in addition to general chemistry.

Objectives

• Use the seemingly abstract concept of Avogadro’s number in a concrete way to carry out a cost calculation.
• Realize that although a mole is a unit of mass, like a pound or a kilogram, it is more fundamentally a counting measurement, like a dozen or a gross, and that it is the mass of the individual particles in the count that determines the mass of the mole.
• Make calculations that are at least three-significant-figure accuracy.
• Gain practice in documenting the methods used to inter-convert the units used in calculations.

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