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It's like telling a chemist that moles are a useless complication. They'll swear up and down how important they but have no reasons except that everyone in the field uses them so they must be important. Sometimes conventions live on past the original need they met and experts are blind to that because they're only experts in using the convention, not evaluating conventions. Moles might have made sense when we didn't even know atoms existed and perhaps dB are similar, though I wouldn't know about that one.

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tzs 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Moles might have made sense when we didn't even know atoms existed and perhaps dB are similar, though I wouldn't know about that one.

Moles make sense because atoms exist.

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foxglacier a day ago | parent [-]

Moles still work without knowing that atoms exist. The quantity being called "amount of substance" not "number of things" reflects that. However, they are still a redundant over-complicated legacy that doesn't need to exist.

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Ekaros a day ago | parent [-]

Moles are used because they are useful abstraction. When you want to get from reaction equation to actual real word having some fixed weight is useful. It becomes useful to have fixed relatively usable quantity to work with.

They are relatively decent size for actually weighing out things.

And honestly mapping number of elementary particles directly to grams is not unreasonable. Even if because physics of world are tad weird there is still possibility for some sanity checks.

	▲	foxglacier 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They're not necessary, just a complicated way of doing what SI prefixes already do. Chemists don't notice this because they're intertwined with a whole network of conventions that would all have to be discarded at the same time. That's the legacy effect - it's too hard to untangle all at once. Inches are a relatively decent size for measuring lengths too, but people manage without.