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If I hammered and flattened a penny enough, could I cover the entire earth with it?


Grag 16th Nov, 2021
Answer (1)
Nitin Mereddy 16th Nov, 2021

No. If you spread out the atoms from a single penny over the entire surface of the earth, you would no longer have a single piece of solid material since the atoms would be too far apart to bond to each other. Let's do some careful calculations to show this result. A modern United States penny has a mass of 2.500 grams according to the US Mint. Since a penny is composed of 97.50% zinc and 2.50% copper, it therefore contains 2.4375 grams of zinc and 0.0625 grams of copper. At a molar mass of 65.380 grams per mole for zinc and 63.546 grams per mole for copper, a penny therefore contains 0.037282 moles of zinc and 0.00098354 moles of copper. Since a mole of atoms contains 6.0221 x 1023 atoms, there are 2.2452 x 1022 zinc atoms and 5.9230 x 1020 copper atoms in a penny, for a total of 2.3044 x 1022 atoms in a penny.

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