Tag: tetrahedron

The Mastery of The Pyramids

On By rolcottIn Chemistry, Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Hard to believe, Sy.”

“What’s hard to believe, Vinnie?”

“What you said back there, about all molecules being tetrahedron-shaped.”

“Whoa, that’s not what I said.  What I did say was that the tetrahedron is the fundamental structural building block for most of the Universe’s molecules. To put a finer point on it, it’s the building block for most kinds of molecules.”

“What kinds are you leaving out?”

“Molecular hydrogen, for instance.  It’s probably the most common molecule in the Universe but it’s got only two atoms and two electrons and it doesn’t do tetrahedra.  I was talking about almost all the other flavors.  Molecules can have all kinds of shapes, from spherical to long and skinny.  Say, Eddie, do your kids play with Legos?”

“Geez, yes.  My feet find blocks all over the house.  Only thing worse is glitter.”

“You can build just about any shape from those rectangular blocks, right?  Pegs on one block plug into holes on other blocks and pretty soon you’ve got a rocket ship or something.  Atoms can work the same way.  Four bonding orbitals pointing out to those pyramid corners, ready to share with whatever comes along.”

“Not just with hydrogen like with that CH4 stuff?”

“Depends on the atom, but in general, yeah.  Except for the outermost columns of the Periodic Table, most of the elements in the upper rows can be persuaded to share at least one bond with most of the others.  Carbon’s the champ that links with practically everything.”Tetrahedral bonding

“Even carbon?”

“Especially carbon, Vinnie.  Linking to carbon is carbon’s best thing.  It’s even got three and a fraction different ways to do it.  Here’s a sketch.  It boils down to the different ways you can have two tetrahedra match up points.”

“Lemme look at this for a minute… OK, that point-to-point one at the top —”

“It’s called a single bond.”

“Whatever, you’re saying that could be like two –CH3 pieces tied together.”

“Mm-hm.  The –CH3‘s are methyl groups, and with two of them you’ve got ethane.  Or link a methyl to a –CH2CH3 and you’ve got propane, or link it to an –OH to get methyl alcohol.  At least in principle you can pop a methyl onto any other atom or molecule that started off with only one unit of charge in an unshared orbital.”

“So it’s like my daughter’s bead necklace where she can pop it apart and add all different kinds of beads.”

“Exactly, Eddie, except her beads probably have their two links in a straight line.  These atoms support four links at 109° angles to each other.”

“That picture reminds me of one of my kids’ toys that’s like a top spinning on top of another top.  Is there anything that locks the two sides together so they can’t do that?”

“One way is if the two sides are each linked to bulky groups that get in each other’s way.  Hydrogens don’t much.  Scientists have measured methyl group rotation rates above 10 million cycles per second.”

“Hey, I’m still looking over here.  These other diagrams say that the tetrahedron things can link along an edge —”

“That’d be a double bond, Vinnie.”

“Looks to me like those double-bond shapes are locked in.  No rotation there, right?”

“Right.  In fact, rotational stability across a double bond is so strong that different arrangements operate like different compounds.  Switching A\B:C\D to A\B:D\C can be the difference between a useful med and something that’s inert or even toxic.”

“And I suppose when they match up whole triangles that’s a triple bond?”

“You got it.”

“Well, that can’t spin, for sure.”

“Nah, Vinnie, that’s like the atom-in-a-field thing, no difference between x- and y- axes.  Spinning like crazy except you can’t see it.”

“Eddie’s right, Vinnie.  The four atoms in a triple-bond structure are in a line.  The charge of three electron pairs mushes into a barrel-shaped region between the two carbons.”

“All that pent-up charge, I bet it’s reactive as hell.”

“Uh-huh.  With hydrogen atoms at both ends that’s acetylene gas.  Let that stuff touch copper and you get explosive decomposition.”

“So that’s why they say don’t run acetylene through copper tubing or brass fittings.”

“Believe it, Vinnie.  Believe it.”

~~ Rich Olcott

The Shape of Water

On By rolcottIn Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Amazing what you can do with mozzarella drips and crumbled pizza edges.  Vinnie’s rolling his crumbs into decent-sized marbles.  (Pizza-maker Eddie’s giving him a look.)  He adds a fourth ball to his triangle to make a square.  “So anyway, what you’re telling us is that Bohr’s 8-electron shell isn’t that far off.”

“Oh, it is far off.  Bohr put his electrons in a plane like your square there.  Try putting that fourth ball on top of the others to make a triangular pyramid.  See that?  Counting the bottom it’s a four-sided figure called a tetrahedron.  It’s the fundamental structural building block for most of the Universe’s molecules.”Water molecule“Hey, that’s the alpha-particle shape that the protons and neutrons get themselves into.”

“Good point, Vinnie.  Mind you, though, an alpha particle doesn’t have a central attractor, and it’s a quarter-million times smaller than an atom’s electron cloud.  Got that pyramid shape in mind?”

“Sure.”

“OK, put those balls back in your square. … Put a finger on the north ball and another on the south one.  Now roll them both up into contact on top of the line between the east and west ones.”

“Hey, it’s that tetra-thing again.”

“Right, Eddie.  Any time you have four objects each the same distance from all the others, you’ve got a tetrahedron.  If the ‘objects’ are clouds of electron charge all attracted to the nucleus and all repelled by the other clouds, that’s the shape they’ll take.  It’s no accident that an equal mix of an atom’s spherical and three dumbbell orbitals in a shell makes four equivalent orbitals pointing to the corners of a tetrahedron.”

“Cute, but what’s it get us?”

“It gets us to the chemists’ trick for thinking about molecular structures without doing all the quantum mechanics.  The key is that 8-electron shell.  Forget electrons racing in a ring or electron pairs in a square.  When you see a chemical diagram with four lines coming out of a central atom, think of them in a tetrahedron.  Here’s an example.  Guess what’s the commonest atom in the Universe.”

“Helium.”

“Hydrogen.”

“Eddie’s win with hydrogen — 923,000 atoms out of a million.  Carbon’s the fourth most common, 480 atoms per million.  Think of a carbon atom, floating around in space with four of its six units of electronic charge in its 2-shell.  And it’s surrounded by hydrogen atoms with electrons just begging to pair up with something.  No surprise, there’s suddenly a lot of electron pairing and you’ve got a molecule of methane, CH4.  What’s its shape?  Any hydrogen-hydrogen chains in there?”

“With this build-up, I gotta guess they’re all on the carbon and that they’re splayed out tetrahedron-like, hydrogen centers trying to get away from the other ones and shared charge clouds trying to get away from each other, too.”

“Couldn’t put it better myself, Vinnie.”

“Hey, water’s H2O, right?  You can’t make a tetrahedron from only three atoms.”

“True, Eddie, but an oxygen atom comes with two more electrons than carbon has.  We’ve still got a tetrahedron, but only two of its corners carry a hydrogen.  The other two orbitals stick out their own directions, each loaded with negative charge.  The chemists call that unshared kind of orbital a lone pair.  They often show it as a double-dot on the structure diagram. That’s basically just a bookkeeping device to keep track of electron counts.  All the charge is really spread around throughout all the molecular orbitals just like with atomic orbitals, only it’s not spread evenly.”

“Why do they bother to keep track like that?”

“Lone pairs affect the molecule’s structure.  If it weren’t for them, the water molecule would be a straight line.  In fact, a lone pair orbital crowds the space a bit more than a bonding pair — the H–O–H angle is about 5º smaller than a perfect tetrahedron.”

“Makes sense when you think about it, like you can wave a stick all over the place unless someone grabs the other end.”

“Mm-hm.  The big reason chemists care, though, is that lone pairs can be active centers during a chemical reaction.  All that negative charge just waiting for something positive-ish to come along.”

“Like a really good tip,” grumbles Eddie.

~~ Rich Olcott