Ever tried to count to a billion? Honestly, don't. If you sat there and ticked off one number every second, you’d be at it for 31 years. Now, imagine taking that billion, multiplying it by another billion, and then multiplying that by another hundred thousand. You've just arrived at 10 to the 23 power.
It’s a number that feels fake. It’s so big it stops being a "count" and starts being a concept, yet it is the literal foundation of how we understand the physical world. If you’ve ever sat in a high school chemistry class and felt your eyes glaze over when the teacher mentioned "The Mole," you were actually being introduced to the scale of 10 to the 23 power. We call it Avogadro’s number, or more specifically, $6.022 \times 10^{23}$.
Without this specific order of magnitude, we couldn't make medicine. We couldn't build semi-conductors. We couldn't even tell you how much oxygen is left in a scuba tank. It is the bridge between the invisible world of atoms and the "real" world where we actually live and breathe.
The Absolute Scale of a Sextillion
Scientists call 10 to the 23 power a "sextillion" in the short scale used in the US and UK. It looks like this: 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
That is a lot of zeros. Twenty-three of them, to be exact.
To give you some perspective, let's look at the sand. If you took every single grain of sand on every beach and every desert on Earth, you’d have about 7.5 quintillion grains. That’s $7.5 \times 10^{18}$. You are still a hundred thousand times short of reaching 10 to the 23 power. You would need to find 10,000 more Earths, strip all their beaches, and pile that sand into a mountain just to get close to this number.
But here is the kicker: that massive, planet-swallowing number of atoms fits inside a single breath of air or a small sip of water. Specifically, 18 grams of water—about a tablespoon—contains roughly $6.022 \times 10^{23}$ molecules.
It’s mind-bending.
We live in a world of giants compared to the atomic scale. Every time you touch a smartphone or drink a soda, you are interacting with trillions upon trillions of tiny components. The sheer density of the universe at the microscopic level is what makes 10 to the 23 power so vital. It’s the conversion factor. It translates the mass of a single proton (which is impossibly light) into grams (which we can actually measure on a kitchen scale).
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Amedeo Avogadro and the Ghost of a Number
The guy whose name is attached to this, Amedeo Avogadro, never actually knew the number was 10 to the 23 power. He died in 1856.
Back then, he just had a hunch. He hypothesized that equal volumes of gases, at the same temperature and pressure, contain the same number of molecules. He didn't have a microscope powerful enough to see them. He didn't have a computer. He just had logic. It wasn't until Jean Perrin won the Nobel Prize in 1926 that we actually pinned down the value using Brownian motion—the jagged, jittery movement of particles suspended in a fluid.
Perrin proved that the "graininess" of reality was real. He showed that the universe isn't a smooth continuous soup; it's made of distinct "bits," and those bits are so small that it takes 10 to the 23 power of them to make anything substantial.
Why 10 to the 23 power Matters in 2026 Technology
You might think this is just academic fluff. It’s not.
In the world of 2026 tech, we are pushing the limits of materials science. When engineers design the next generation of solid-state batteries for electric vehicles, they aren't just "mixing chemicals." They are calculating ion transport at the scale of 10 to the 23 power.
If your lithium-ion battery has a tiny impurity—say, one part per billion—that still means there are trillions of "bad" atoms floating around in there. Managing those numbers is the difference between a battery that lasts twenty years and one that catches fire on the highway.
The Computing Crisis
We are also hitting a wall in silicon manufacturing. As transistors get smaller, we are approaching the "atomic limit." A modern chip has features only a few dozen atoms wide. When you’re dealing with 10 to the 23 power of atoms in a wafer, but your individual switch is only 50 atoms wide, quantum tunneling starts to happen. Electrons just... jump through walls. They stop obeying the rules of classical physics because the scale is too small.
Basically, we've spent the last century learning how to manipulate the "mass" of 10 to the 23 power. Now, we are trying to learn how to manipulate the individual atoms within that group. It's like going from steering a herd of cattle to giving each individual cow a specific GPS coordinate.
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Misconceptions About the Size of the Universe
People often confuse the "number of atoms in the universe" with these kinds of scales.
Actually, the observable universe contains about $10^{80}$ atoms. That makes 10 to the 23 power look like a rounding error. But on the flip side, people often underestimate how much "stuff" is in their own bodies.
You have roughly $7 \times 10^{27}$ atoms in your body. You are, quite literally, a walking collection of septillions of atoms. You are a vast universe in your own right. Every time you blink, you've used energy powered by chemical reactions involving 10 to the 23 power molecules of ATP (adenosine triphosphate).
The Financial Comparison (Don't try this at home)
If you had 10 to the 23 power dollars, you could buy the Earth. Not the property on the Earth—the actual planet. You could buy the sun. You could buy the entire Milky Way galaxy and still have enough left over to be the richest person in history by a margin that makes Elon Musk look like he's searching for spare change in a couch.
There isn't enough currency in existence, or even enough digital bits in all the banks on the planet, to represent that number. It only exists in the physical reality of atoms.
How We Measure the Unmeasurable
How do we actually know it's 10 to the 23 power? We don't just count them.
We use X-ray crystallography. By firing X-rays at a crystal, scientists can see how the beams bounce off the atoms. The pattern of that "bounce" tells us exactly how far apart the atoms are. If you know the distance between atoms and the total volume of the crystal, you can do some basic (okay, maybe not that basic) math to figure out how many atoms are in the block.
$$n = \frac{m}{M}$$
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In that formula, $n$ is the number of moles. If $n$ is 1, you have $6.022 \times 10^{23}$ particles. It’s the most consistent "yardstick" we have for the physical world.
Recently, the scientific community actually redefined the kilogram. It used to be based on a physical hunk of metal kept in a vault in France. But metal can lose atoms. It can oxidize. It can change. Now, the kilogram is defined by the Planck constant, which links it back to these fundamental numbers like 10 to the 23 power.
We moved from a "maybe" to a "definitely."
Real-World Impact: Medicine and Environment
If you’ve ever taken a homeopathic "remedy" that was diluted to 30C, you should know about 10 to the 23 power. A 30C dilution means the original substance was diluted 1 part in $10^{60}$.
Since there are only about $10^{23}$ molecules in a standard dose of liquid, a 30C dilution mathematically guarantees that there is not a single molecule of the original substance left in the bottle. It’s just water. The scale of 10 to the 23 power is the ultimate "BS detector" for chemistry.
In environmental science, we use this number to track CO2 in the atmosphere. When we say CO2 has hit 420 parts per million (ppm), we are talking about a ratio. But to understand the heat-trapping capacity of that gas, we have to calculate the number of molecules interacting with infrared radiation. That’s 10 to the 23 power territory again.
Actionable Insights: Why You Should Care
Understanding this scale changes how you see the world. It moves you away from seeing things as "solid" and toward seeing them as "statistical."
- Check your labels: When you see "parts per billion" on a water quality report, remember that even "low" concentrations involve trillions of atoms. It helps you understand why even small amounts of certain toxins (like lead or mercury) are dangerous.
- Appreciate your hardware: Next time your phone lags, realize it's managing electrical signals across billions of transistors, each composed of a precise number of atoms. It's a miracle it works at all.
- Think in powers of ten: Most people think linearly ($1, 2, 3$). If you start thinking exponentially ($10, 100, 1000$), you’ll understand tech trends, inflation, and viral growth much better.
The number 10 to the 23 power is the secret code of the universe. It’s the bridge between the math we do on paper and the physical reality we touch. It’s huge, it’s invisible, and it’s the reason everything stays together.
To dive deeper into this, you should look into the International System of Units (SI) updates from 2019. They essentially "fixed" Avogadro's number as a constant, meaning it's no longer something we measure, but something we've defined to keep the universe's math consistent. Read up on the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) archives if you want to see the literal experiments—involving near-perfect spheres of silicon—that were used to finalize this number for the modern age.