Tuesday, November 9, 2010

More Fun with Periodic Trends

Hello to my followers (my mighty army of two) and welcome to another day in the life of a student chemist. I've decided to do a post every other day, so I will try to keep to that schedule. I read the news today (oh boy) and saw that the Cern super collider in France is launching lead ions into each other and creating explosions exceeding trillions of degrees.


Besides that awesomeness, I learned some cool stuff about Paramagnetivity. Its a cool little thing that happens when there are unpaired electrons in an element. See, there are a bunch of little rings that electrons like to hang out in when they spin around the nucleus. There are small ones called s orbitals, bigger ones called p orbitals, and so on with d, f, g, h, and i. There is only one s orbital in a level, and it can hold two electrons. Then there is the p orbitals which can have three orbitals per level, and each one holds two. The d orbital holds five, and so on. No there is a cool little rule called the Pauli exclusion principle which states that when you start filling those orbitals, you fill each orbital with an electron before you fill it completely. The electrons dont want to be together in an orbital, so if a new electron is put on that level, it will take an orbital that is empty. So if we are looking at a d orbital, it will fill all five of those orbitals with an electron before they pair up. SOOO the more electrons that are alone in their orbital, the more the atom is paramagnetic. That means that iron, what everybody thinks of as being magnetic, is pretty paramagnetic. it has six electrons in a d orbital, so it has four unpaired electrons. This makes it responsive to a magnetic current. The exact opposite charge is diamagnetivity. The more paired electrons there are the more diamagnetic it is. So paramagnetic elements will react with magnets. Diamagnetic elements will not. So thats cool.

Tomorrow I'm going to found out about lattice energy, which sounds so sci fi and coolio that you can't help but be excited. I will see you saturday. For now, I'll leave you with this. Ever heard of OK GO? Well they made this awesome music video for physic nerds.



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