|
| Q: | How many atoms are in a dog?
-Cathy (age 6)
Leal School, Urbana |
|
| A: | We put our team of engineers, chemists, and physicists to work on this
problem, and finally came up with an answer. Let’s say you’ve got a
pretty big German Shephard who weighs 100 pounds. There would be about
3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in him!
(Scientists
often write big numbers like that in "scientific notation", like this:
3*10^27. That just means three followed by twenty-seven zeros.)
So
how many is that? Well, if you had a grain of sand for every atom in
that dog, you’d have enough to cover the entire United States with a
layer of sand 65 miles deep!
Atoms are SO SMALL, that you need piles and piles of them to build anything big enough to even see!
What
about a chihuahua? They usually weigh only about five pounds, so you’d
only need 150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms to make one.
(republished on 07/18/06) |
|