• Question: how did amedeo avogadro calculate avogadro´s number?

    Asked by anon-267388 on 5 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Bradley Young

      Bradley Young answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      The avogadro number was actually estimated by Perrin about 90 years later and after that was measured.

      It was measured by determining the amount of charge on a mole of electrons and then dividing by the charge of a single electron.

    • Photo: Adrien Chauvet

      Adrien Chauvet answered on 5 Nov 2020: last edited 5 Nov 2020 3:24 pm

      For sure, he did not count particles one by one!
      (I hope he never tried)

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 8 Nov 2020:

      Amedeo Avogadro didn’t actually discover Avogadro’s number. It was named that in tribute to him as he first proposed that the volume of a gas is proportional to the number of atoms, regardless of the type of gas. A physicist called Jean Perrin first coined the term and defined it as the number of oxygen atoms in 32g of oxygen. To calculate it, he did several experiments. One method was by studying the Brownian motion of small spherical particles. He observed the diffusion of the particles and used this Avogadro’s number. He used an equation in a paper of Einstein’s to calculate it!

Comments