“Hey, Sy, what you said back there, ‘three and a fraction‘ ways to link atoms together…”

“Yeah, Vinnie?”

“What’s that about?  How do fractions come in when you’re counting?”

“Well, I was thinking about how atoms in separate molecules can interact short of reacting and forming new molecular orbitals.  I figure that as a fraction.”

“Charge sharing ain’t the whole story?”

“It would be except that sharing usually isn’t equal.  It depends on where the atoms are in the Periodic Table.”

“What’s it got to do with the Periodic Table?”

“The Table’s structure reflects atom structures — how many shells are active in a base-state atom of each element and how many units of charge are in its outermost shell.  Hydrogen and Helium are in Row 1 because the 1-node shell is the only active one in those atoms.  The atoms from Lithium to Neon in Row 2 have charge activating both the 1-node shell and the 2-node shell, and so on.”

“What’s that get us?”

“It gets us a feel for how the atoms behave.  You know I’m all about dimensions, right?”

“Ohhh, yeah.”

“OK, we’ve got a two-dimensional table here.  Going across, each atom’s nucleus has one more proton than its buddy to the left.  What’s that going to do to the electronic charge?”

“Gonna pull it in closer.”

“Wait, Vinnie, there’s an extra electron in there, too.  Won’t that cancel out the proton, Sy?”

“Good thinking, Eddie.  Yes, it does, but only partially.  The atoms do get smaller as you go across, but it’s irregular because negative-negative repulsion within a shell works to expand it almost as much as negative-positive attraction contracts it.”

“Bet things get bigger as you go down the Table, though.”

“Mostly, Vinnie, because each row down adds a shell that’s bigger than the shrinking inner shells.”

“Mostly?”

“The bigger shells with more nodes have more complex charge patterns than just balls and dumbbells.  Those two rows below the main table actually squinch into the lowest two boxes in the third column.  In those elements, some of the activated patterns barely shield the nucleus.  The atoms to their right in the main table are almost identical in size to the elements above them.”

“So I can guess an atom’s size.  So what?”

“So that and the charge give you a handle on the element’s properties and chemistry.  Up there in the top right corner you’ve got the atoms with the highest ratio of nuclear charge to size.  If given the opportunity to pull charge from atoms to their left and below them, what do you suppose happens?”

“You get lop-sided bonds, I guess.”

“Exactly.  In water, for instance, the Oxygen pulls charge towards itself and away from the Hydrogen atoms.  That makes each O-H bond a little dipole, positive-ish at the hydrogen end and negative-ish at the oxygen end.”

“Won’t the positive-ish ends pull on the negative-ish parts of next-door molecules?”

“You’ve just invented hydrogen bonding, Eddie.  That’s exactly what happens in liquid water.  Each molecule can link up like that with many adjacent ones and build a huge but floppy structure.  It’s floppy because hydrogen bonds are nowhere near as strong as orbital-sharing bonds.  Even so, the energy required to move through liquid H₂O or to vaporize it is much greater than for liquid methane (CH₄), ammonia (NH₃) or any similar molecule.”

“Can that pull-away action go all the way?”

“You’ve just invented ionic bonding, Vinnie.  The elements in the Oxygen and Fluorine columns can extract charge completely away from many of those far to the left and below them.  Fluorine steals charge from Lithium, for instance.  Fluoride ions are net negative, lithium ions are net positive.  Opposites attract, same as always, but now it’s  entire ions that attract each other and you get crystals.”

“That’s your and-a-fraction?”

“Not quite, Vinnie.  There’s one more, Van der Waals forces.  They come from momentary polarizations as electron chaos sloshes back and forth in neighboring molecules.  They’re why solids are solid even without ionic or hydrogen bonding.”

“Geez, look at the time.  Rosalie’s got my dinner waiting.  Bye, guys, everybody out!”

~~ Rich Olcott