Mole Day

Mole Day is a nerd holiday celebrated on October 23 between 6:02 a.m. and 6:02 p.m. in honor of Avogadro’s number, $6.02\times 10^{23}$. In 10th grade, my chemistry class was assigned a project for mole day. The project was pretty open-ended. There was a long list of things we could make, and it include things like a comic, a short film, and website. The only real requirement was that the product had to be related to moles in some way. I decided to make a “website,” but I interpreted that option very literally in order to allow myself a lot of freedom.

This was what I made. I’ve also remade the project below because I was not very good at JavaScript in 10th grade.¹ This remake also depicts a mole more precisely. The number of triangles in the old version is $3^{50} \approx 7.18\times 10^{23}$.² It also has much smoother animation, and it’s mobile friendly (though, it’s better on desktop).

Unfortunately, your browser does not support HTML canvases.

Interestingly, this demo might make a mole seem bigger than it actually is. The triangles are arranged flat on a plane rather than packed together in space, unlike most atoms in the real world. A mole of carbon atoms arranged in a sheet one atom thick would have an area of 10 000 m², or almost an entire soccer field, but a mole of carbon atoms arranged in a ball would have a volume of 1.2 cm³, which is less than a teaspoon.[^stats] Also, the Sierpiński triangle has density zero. If a mole of carbon atoms was arranged like the triangles were in the demo, the entire triangle would have sides 160 km long and have an area of 11 000 km², larger than Delaware. Of course, the triangle would be mostly empty space, but this does mean that at the end of the demo, the individual white triangles become about a million times smaller than actual atoms.

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