Alright. So a mole is just a number, and that number coincides with the atoms in 12g of C12 at rest, in the same way that the number 5 coincides with the fingers on my hand and doesn't change if I chop one off. The connection I'm having trouble making is, how can this be used to...
I appreciate your help. I follow everything you're saying, and I'll try to be as precise in my language as I can. Yes, I was considering the kinetic energy of the constituents of the atom, but I do recognize that they are conflated into the atom's frame of reference, and at rest with zero...
Yes, precisely what I'm trying to work around. It would in fact be impossible to bring it to true rest i.e. a state of zero motion. However, with that established, there are a variety of rest masses that could be measured: say, one at 300K, or as a plasma in the mass spectrometer, or one...
Thank you both for your insights. Xox, I know exactly what you mean about linguistics being a relatively (haha) inferior means of describing these properties; it seems like conflicting definitions of mass and energy are the source of many of the contrary opinions I've been reading. Unfortunately...
Yes, it seems like some of the answers I've been reading elsewhere do not distinguish between "there is a negligible effect" and "there is NO effect". The class's original question referred to 13g of gold, so the result, according to these values, would have been trivial on the macroscopic scale...
Thank you, it sounds like we share the same understanding; the atoms retain a fixed individual rest mass, while the rest mass of the solid object increases with energy. And, yes, this does not change the number of atoms in the object, but (and this was the crux of my original inquiry) it would...
I'm a high school chem and physics teacher, participating in a recreational online chem course hosted by MIT.
One of the practice questions in this course asked how many atoms a certain mass would contain at 300K. This got me thinking about mass-energy equivalence, and whether the atomic...