Avogadro Number and Philosophy

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There are two ways by which we can approach philosophy: the big picture approach and the deep insight approach. The big picture approach takes a holistic view of philosophy—it seeks to draw broad inferences on man’s nature and his place in the universe. The deep insight approach entails a dive into the philosophical treatises to conduct an examination of the philosophical arguments.

To develop a philosophical view of the world it is necessary to have a mixture of both the approaches—a holistic view of philosophy should go hand in hand with the knowledge of the arguments on which the philosophy is built.

The big picture approach and the deep insight approach are also relevant to the world of science. You can look at the universe as a whole, or you can approach it through the smallest entities (the atoms) from which everything in the universe is constituted. One of the big numbers that we encounter while taking the universe as a whole approach is the age of the universe—scientists believe that the universe is around 15 billion years old or 15 X 10⁹ years old. In approaching the universe through the atoms, we encounter the  Avogadro Number which relates to the number of atoms in one mole (one gram) of an element; by definition, it is exactly 6.02214076×10²³.

The Avogadro Number (6.02214076×10²³) is much greater than the age of the universe (15 X 10⁹ years). Even if we calculate the age of the universe in days, minutes, or even in seconds, we get numbers that are much smaller than the  Avogadro Number. What does this tell us? The possibilities for knowledge when we conduct an examination of the smallest of the small things is as great as the possibilities that are there when we study the universe as a whole. In philosophy the examination of the basic arguments can never end, because the possibilities for finding new implications of these arguments is endless, and the discovery of new answers always leads to the rise of several new questions.