This sounds interesting. Do you have a cite for that? Possible including driving directions?
:calls trailer rental:
Where in the IUPAC definition does it say anything about a well defined molecular weight? Indeed, it specifically talks about polymer molecules.
An individual polymer molecule has a well defined molecular weight (eg. 20,234 or 10,345,333). Samples of a polymer of course have a mixture of molecules with a wide range of individual molecular weights.
Unless a polymer is soluble then it becomes hard to tell if it is completely one molecule, or just several entangled together. Polymers are routinely measured up to 10 million molecular weightby chromatography, and light scattering will measure weights higher than this. Whether your cross-linked chair or diamond crystal actually has a complete covalent network throughout, or there are grain boundaries where noncovalent linkages exist is tricky and may not be known for sure. So my guess is that we are completely sure that soluble molecules exist with molecular weights of 50 million or so. Almost certainly there are diamonds and polymers much much bigger, but it is probably almost impossible to prove.
My pleasure. I give you titin.
Beta-galactosidase weighs in at a puny 116.4kDa. The best estimate for titin is a whopping 3.5MDa, and contains 26-27,000 amino acid residues, as compared with “over 1,000” for beta-galactosidase.
It is still only 1 micron long though.
A molecule of carbon? Dunno.