May 06, 2006

The Nature of the Chemical Bond - howdt edition

Chemistry defines two types of chemical bonds - ionic and covalent. A ionic bond is a bond where one player gives a unit to another that links the two players through a tethered charge interaction. The more electonic currency units passed, the more bonding and the more difficult to separate the units. In water solution, however, the rules of ionic bonding are mediated by the polarity, concentration and charge-mediating properties of the solution. In fact - ionic compounds called salts dissolve in water and do not affect pH - the hydrogen ion potential.

The second type of bond is called the covalent bond which is constituted by mutual sharing of electronic toys. Each player has an optimum goal of eight and by putting forth the units in an order where everybody gets to use eight electronic toys - some held on own, some commonly shared - each player can create his tune, build his bridge, get his work done. Breaking these bonds requires more energy than solvation of ionic bonds, and the fragments form new covalent bonds and get on with their eight toys and another comfortable space. Cluster size creates specific know geometry in space.

The two types of bonds can exist in the same compound - as any sulfate or nitrate salt has the oxygen covalent bonds and the attraction of ions to contribute the free extra toys, as long as they can hang on the outside for a ride. The riders switch readily in solution, whereas the entity with covalency conducts the units business to the exclusion of the riders. The riders tend to be positive charged units - known as metal ions, and they have various roles in biological systems. They hop on and get off the negative charge bus, that was collateralized by the donation of electrons by an original molecular entity.

Original molecular entity is a strange term - it connotes a bias of being there before the change occurred. If chemistry is the operational state of life, the universe and everything, then it stands to reason that these original molecular entities are really a dream state thate we hypothesize exists to give us the basis of an explanation that can be grasped in reasonable common terms. {Science uses big words to mean simple things to scare people off - this is a drawing of a picture in terms people can explain, but it does not really work this way - it just can be explained this way so you see how it works. Then you can work it through yourself and either get it, or not - but try again some other time in some other fashion, because the more people that get it, the better off we will be.}

So the elemental state - where an element is assigned its number of electrons, the original playing set of toys, distributed a fixed number of toys based on proton count, which also happens to be atomic number. {If this is confusing - you need the electron hotel. Jump to *}

These break down into metals, which ditch their biggest electronic toys for a comfortable existence, or non-metals, which interact, share and occupy lots of trading space and require extra toys. The cost of the extra toys is the mobility system for the metal ions. These big extra toys that get ditched by the metals are the necessary capital required to create the units of stability that are required to create the clusters of non-metals. In chemistry terms - metals make cations, non-metals make anions and both have the same set of stability - eight toys on their playing field.

* None of this argument here presupposes any life - in fact the element essential to life carbon has an entire game of its own that is not germane to this course of explanation. Understand that cations are metals that have a positive charge, anions are non-metals and non-metal clusters that have a negative charge and that ionic bonds are where the positive and negative charges come to balance. All compounds make of cations and anions are called salts, unless the cation is hydrogen, in which case the compounds are called acids. Cations and Anions form Ionic Bonds - The cations are the riders, the anions are the factories that create the rides.

Covalent bonds mean that everybody gets eight toys - the toys are electrons and if you have your eight, you are closed and the entity does not need any changing - it remains together until there is energy placed into the system to bust it apart. Polyatomic anions - ones that have multiple sharing partners - have chemical propeties that allow them to provide big amounts of chemical energy to combustive processes, but the activation energy required for release is large.

Society of people seemed to operate by this system too - where families were ionic bonded entities and jobs were small covalent groups where people could team up to make a better living for all. But the social elements kept growing larger and larger and the rules governing the big molecules with the f orbitals are many many essays away from here, the first essay of the adventure (altho some of my prewritten essays to now will be edited and brought back to vogue). Biology can be explained by chemistry and chemistry by physics and physics described by math. But there are some physics realities that are incorrect in their manifestation into chemistry and dr. lenny requests your assistence in ferreting out the anomalies and setting us back on the course of understanding the nature of nature.

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