this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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Me: That doesn't seem right. OH. Oh, I am stupid.
*OH~2~
I am impressed by how clever that was. Well done.
It's almost impossible to see the last two words because your brain is already reeling from the rest of the statement. It took me a few tries to finally parse it.
Not stupid. Our brain can just get tripped up sometimes and read what it expects to read instead of what's really there. The sad part is that there are educated people in the US even today that would be surprised or even argue against you if you stated the other version (more atoms in a glass than in our galaxy). Our science education is woefully lacking now.
What blew me away that I learned not too long ago is the notion that if the galaxy was the size of the US, our solar system would be the size of a fingerprint. Try to even visualize that. (reference is the Epic Spaceman YT channel)
We had a young, hippy science teacher through 70s grade school. Looking back, that woman made more impact on my life than any other teacher.
Every year, every fucking year, she'd start with the difference in fact and opinion. "Yeah, I get it already. Can we move on?" Apparently not many others got that bit of education.
She taught the scientific method and how it works, she taught how to experiment, how to measure. I still set a beaker down and wait for it to settle before moving on. And I'm not in science!
NGL our solar system being the size of a finger print is (somehow) bigger than I expected.
Another fun size thing I heard recently was that if an atom were the size of a football stadium then the nucleus would be the size of a pea.
Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.
A fingerprint? That's actually bigger than I figured.
I very slowly zoomed in on the actual words in the post.
Started off processing "molecule" as "mole", "solar system" as "galaxy", and thinking "ha, don't know if that's true but it sounds both plausible and neat".
There are definitely more hydrogen atoms in a mole of water than stars in the Milky Way.
The Milky Way has somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars according to Wikipedia (
1*10^11to4*10^11). A mole of water has6.022*10^23molecules in it, each of which has two hydrogen atoms in it for a total of1.2044*10^24hydrogen atoms.10^24 / 10^11 = 10^13which is ten trillion. So, a mole of water has roughly ten trillion times as many hydrogen atoms as the Milky Way has stars.Chad water / virgin Milky Way
Imagine how many more moles of hydrogen the Milky way must have than a single mole of water
Wasn't thinking moles, not that technical, but it sounded plausible vs. the number of stars in the Milky Way.
Wait...
The glass of water is a bit misleading. Your brain starts thinking about all the water molecules inside. That's all.