sheet of paper

[steveb]

roughly how many molecules would there be in an A4 sheet of paper, millions or billions?

[mibn2cweus]

16280360088513075017529736159374 and 1/2 aprox.

been up all last night countin.

[Hamish]

Billions of billions. 1 ml of water contains 33.46x10²¹ molecules. Thats 3345 with 19 zeros after it. A billion billion is 10¹⁸ 1 with 18 zeros after it.

[Hamish]

<sup> means super script. HTML doesnt seem to be working any more

[mibn2cweus]

hamish, Your counting methods are vastly superior to mine, (especially when I forget to consider the decimal point).  Assuming that this sheet of paper weighs

� gram, the atomic weight is (~6*10E23/2 = ~3*10E23) devided by the atomic weight of 1 molecule of this paper (maybe 30000?), would give you the answer = ~10E19 = ~10 billion*billion. 

Does anyone know the atomic weight of a molecule of paper?

[Hamish]

Paper is comprised of a whole host of molecules, one being cellulose, wich would probably have a v high molecular weight, and a disterbution thereof in the 100000s, there will also be a reasonable amount of water, calcium carbonate, oils protines etc ..... difficult to give it a real molecular weight, needless to say the answer is easily going to be in excess of a billion.

[Space]

how many atoms then?

[mibn2cweus]

Atoms of different elements very in weight so again we need to know the composition. The AMU (atomic mass unit) is the unit used to define atomic weight and is equal to 1/12 of the mass of Carbon 12, which is ~0.6 million, billion, billionths of a gram. In other words, there would be about 50,000 billion, billion carbon atoms in a gram of carbon 12.