decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
Shells? Collisions? Orbits? Nonsense! | 661 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Shells? Collisions? Orbits? Nonsense!
Authored by: Wol on Saturday, April 06 2013 @ 07:24 AM EDT
Heat energy ... there's actually no such thing. Heat is EITHER microwave
(infra-red) radiation, ie photons, OR it's kinetic energy - the *random*
movement of particles.

Either way, the transfer of heat is easy to understand - either two particles
collide, transferring kinetic energy, or one atom chucks out a photon which is
then absorbed by another atom.

As for flow of electrons - well - that's the bit of CHEMISTRY that interests me
most! I'd say Physical Chemistry is my special interest. You'll notice that the
metals are all clustered to the left and bottom of the periodic table, with all
the insulators to the top and right - and the "noble gases" on the far
right.

With the noble gases, every SUB-shell is full, therefore all the electrons are
tightly held, therefore they are insulators and pretty chemically inert. With
the metals on the left, you have a lone electron or two with a whole shell to
itself to wander as it wishes. It's very easy for these electrons to jump from
orbit to orbit, so when you apply a potential difference across a wire, they
flow easily.

That's why potassium, for example, will explode when you drop it into water. The
electrons are so eager to jump into an H shell, giving off heat as they do so,
that it melts the potassium (speeding up the reaction even more), releases
hydrogen gas, and ignites the gas in the air!

It's also why the elements on the right of the periodic table tend to form
stable compunds. Because their shells are nearly full, when they acquire extra
electrons they hang on to them tight. The other thing to bear in mind is that
electrons can orbit two nuclei - that's what makes a chemical bond. So, to take
water for example, hydrogen has one electron and needs two to fill its first
shell. Oxygen has 2+6 electrons, but needs 8 to fill the second shell. So
hydrogen atom the first shares its electron in return for sharing an oxygen
electron and hydrogen atom the second does the same. So we now have four
electrons solely in the oxygen outer shell, two shared with the first hydrogen,
and two with the second. So each hydrogen "thinks" it has a full
complement of 2, and the oxygen "thinks" it has a full complement of
2+8.

The other thing to remember is pairs of electrons are always more stable than
lone electrons, so any element with an odd atomic number is always likely to be
more reactive than the even numbered ones either side.

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )