Terry Reedy wrote: > On 8/15/2013 2:28 PM, Chris Angelico wrote: >> On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 5:54 PM, Joshua Landau <jos...@landau.ws> wrote: >>> On 15 August 2013 16:43, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> A mole is as much a number (6e23) as the light year is a number (9.5e15). >>> >>> A mole is a number. A light year is a unit. >> >> A mole is an amount of something. Avogadro's Number is a number, which >> is what I was hinting at :) > > The unit for 'mole' is 'ion', 'atom', or 'molecule', as appropriate for > the 'something'. In other words, the units are the reacting input units > and resulting output units in a particular chemical reaction. >
To expand a little on that, the unit of "amount of something" is a "gram mole", which is 6.2 **23 grams times the molecular (or atomic) weight. My dad (research chemist) used to have to order supplies for his lab in "ton moles", and he used some very small multipliers, since he usually needed a kilogram or less in his lab. -- DaveA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
