New #ChemEd paper: “A billion times smaller than us: helping students comprehend the molecular scale” open access at https://doi.org/10.1515/cti-2022-0009. It details an analogy I’ve used with success in first year lectures to convey the immensity of scale differences between us and molecules 1/3
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It uses a small globe and a 3D printed molecule as props: both differ in scale to us by a factor of 100,000,000, so they have been scaled up or down by 10^8 to bring them to a handheld size.
It is of course not a coincidence that the volume difference is 10^24, close to Avogadro’s number! Overall, it’s a fun short accessible teaching moment that can be easily shared with a class. Many thanks to undergraduate Jaspreet Sidhu for her assistance with this project.