It should come as no surprise that we inhabit the macroscopic world; the world of tables and mountains, paper clips, and zip drives. Yet our chemical models generally describe effects in the microscopic world. The above table demonstrates the conversion formula between those worlds: the mole, or 6.022 E 23.
The beginning chemistry student, already burdened with a myriad of annoying conversions: unit conversions, mass to number conversions, mass to energy conversions, etc. is now faced with perhaps the most difficult of all of these conversions: the mole. Why difficult? Because it defines the abstract nature of chemistry… because one’s explanations for events inhabit a world different from that of our own perceptions.

In chemistry, a natural scene becomes, with understanding, transformed into a vast number of chemical and mathematical equations which describe the dynamic processes underlying its specious simplicity and serenity.

In many of our labs we will measure masses in grams, a unit well-known to our senses. But then the strange conversion into moles, our means of counting the unimaginably small, stretches our credulity. What could 6.022 E 23 atoms mean? And it is in this new world, bridged to our experience by the mole concept, that we continue our investigation into formulas, equations, and the like. Having arrived at our microscopic description of macroscopic events, application of that understanding requires conversion back to our own world in order to benefit from chemistry’s predictive power. Therein lies the abstract nature of chemistry and its difficulty for most high school students.

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