I am starting to study physics in detail and as I read about physical quantities, I was puzzled why mol (amount of substance) is taken as a physical quantity.
A physical quantity is any quantity which we can measure and has a unit associated with it. But a mol represents the amount of substance by telling the number of particles (atoms, molecules, ions, etc.) present. So it is a pure number and numbers are dimensionless. So mol should not be considered a physical quantity.
Also, fundamental physical quantities should be independent of each other. I am wondering whether mass and mol are independent. This is so as they surely affect each other as we can evidently see while calculating the number of moles and using the mass of that sample for calculation.
So how is the mol a fundamental physical quantity and independent of mass?
Answer
The mole definitely isn't a fundamental physical quantity. It's just a shorthand for Avogadro's number, to make really big numbers more tractable. It's purely there for convenience, there's nothing fundamentally physically significant about it.
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