Avogadro's number

[alexis castro 1B]

Can someone explain, in a more simple way than what the book did, how Avogadro found the number 6.022x10^23 and knew it was universal and could be applied to any element to convert it from moles to molecules.

[Daniela_Chem14A]

From what I understood, Avogrado's number was based on the idea that a single atom of the Carbon isotope Carbon-12 has a mass of 1.99265x10^-23g. And since a mole refers to a dozen of something in this case a dozen of grams of carbon which equals 12g of carbon. They used these 12g of carbon and divided them by the 1.99265x10^-23g of the carbon-12 isotope to get Avogrado's number which, equals 6.0221x10^23. Avogrado's number can be used universally because Avogrado's number equals 1 mole. So whenever moles are used, Avogrado's number can be use in order to convert to atoms, particles or molecules. Hope this helps!

[Mia Navarro 1D]

To add a little more context if you were curious as to why they picked the element and quantities that they did, the decision was arbitrary. As Dr. Lavelle explained in a lecture earlier this week, the Avogadro's number could have depended on 10g of cobalt. Though, carbon is an easily obtainable element in nature, and the molar mass was a plausible quantity of the element that could be used for the experiment.

Hope this helps!

Mia Navarro