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This is tricky because, believe it or not, there are potentially as many atoms in a grain of sand as their are stars in the entire universe. But, here goes.

Sand is made up of Silica, which has the formula SiO2

silicon weighs 28 atomic units

Oxygen weighs 16 atomic units

so each SiO2 weighs 60 atomic units

There are 6.023 x 1023 atomic units in a gram. that is 6 with 23 zeros after it.

So there would be 6.023 x 1023 / 60 = 1x 1022 SiO2s in a gram, so 3 x 1022 atoms in a gram.

Say a grain of sand is 1mm across it has a volume of 0.001cm3;1cm3 of sand weighs about 2.6g, so a grain of sand will weigh 0.0026g.

So, to find the number of atoms in a grain of sand we multiply the number of atoms per gram by the number of grams:

3 x 1022 x 0.0026g = 7.8 x 1019 atoms

or

78,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Assuming you could count 2 atoms per second, it would take approximately 1,236,681,887,366 (1.2 Trillion) years.

Yes, really. If I were you I would try counting at least four every second, then it would only take 6.2 billion. You'd have a lot more free time.

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13y ago
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AnswerBot

5mo ago

It would take an extremely long time, possibly thousands of years, to count all the atoms in a single grain of sand given that a grain of sand contains trillions of atoms. Counting atoms in a grain of sand is practically impossible due to the sheer number and the limitations of our counting capabilities.

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Continue Learning about Natural Sciences

How much does a grain of rice weigh?

A very rough approximation would be in the order of 1023 atoms, ie a 1 followed by 23 zeros, which is a very big number. Given that there are over 10^21 atoms in a large grain of sand, weighing 0.03g there will be a lot more (maybe x10 or x100) in a grain of rice (which is much larger than a grain of sand). Note that rice is organic so will have a lot of hydrogen atoms as well as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and many others in lesser degree. The previously stated answer of "30,000 atoms in one grain of rice" is absurd. Either the poster is testing how long it takes for an incorrect answer to be fixed or is quite ignorant of atomic dimensions (or both!).


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