Unfortunately, there's only so much time to teach chemistry, so instructors stick to general rules of thumb and overarching patterns. It you don't, mercury wouldn't melt until 82 degrees Celsius. In fact, studies have shown that those 6s electrons in mercury (and gold) are so weird that you actually have to account for relativity in order for them to make sense. That's somewhat true, but if you look at something like this picture, you'll see that there are many differences. It's common practice in introductory chemistry courses to condense into a "noble gas configuration" like this:īut that's based on the assumption that all s orbitals look the same, and the valence shell is all that matters. Mercury has all of its electrons paired up, which will further reduce sharing between atoms. Gold also has a single 6s electron (not 9 d electrons, for other reasons I won't go into), which means that it may be very stable, but it still has enough sharing going on between atoms to keep them all together. This means that the nuclei hold on to their electrons more tightly, which means less sharing, which means individual atoms move more freely, so you have less solid behavior. These electrons are spread out a lot, and have been shown to not block the nucleus very well, so the whole atom is smaller than you'd initially expect.
#GOLD ON THE PERIODIC TABLE FULL#
One thing you'll note is that mercury (and gold) have a full complement of 14 f electrons.
That's a lot of electrons, in a lot of different orbitals. The full electron configuration for mercury looks like this, depending on your preferred order:ġs2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p6 4s2 3d10 4p6 5s2 4d10 5p6 6s2 4f14 5d10 For one, we have to start looking at a whole bunch of electrons in all sorts of configurations. This means that "just one more" can make a very big change.įor a more complicated answer about mercury's physical properties in particular, things get far weirder. So you are physically prohibited from making minuscule changes, and must go all or nothing. In a quantum world, you are either one inch or two inches long there is no such thing as fractions. This "quantum" nature literally implies a step function rather than a gradient. This generally has to do with electron configurations, a consequence of the quantum nature of electrons. One proton takes you from carbon, a black (or clear in the case of diamonds) solid with an enormous variety of reactivity and properties, to nitrogen, a colorless gas that's as neutral as you get outside the noble gases. One proton takes you from neon, a gas that reacts with very little, to sodium, a metal that reacts (sometimes violently) with pretty much everything. The simple answer, which many have pointed out, is that one proton (and electron) can change a lot. Unfortunately, this is a question where the answer is either so simplified it doesn't tell you much, or so complicated that you can't understand much.
#GOLD ON THE PERIODIC TABLE SKIN#
TL:DR: Both gold and mercury will kill you via similar mechanisms, mercury is just MUCH more easily absorbed by your body through your skin and more easily exists in gaseous form for you to breathe in. Other elements (such as the alkali metals or halogens) are much. Mercury isn't actually all that reactive, I'd say it's pretty average on the "reactivity" scale. Mercury, on the other hand, being a liquid is easily absorbed into your body (especially as an organometallic compound) and will also kill you via heavy metal poisoning. The D orbitals steal an electron from the S orbitals so you end up with a full shell and a half full shell. Gold has a fully filled outer D shell, and a half filled outer S shell. You generally have to eat a salt of gold very often to get the poisoning.Īs for why gold is so non-reactive? Well in chemistry orbitals that are full or half full are very stable. This type of poisoning was featured on an episode of house. It's just that in it's solid state it's extremely stable/nonreactive and is hard to absorb into the body. Gold IS toxic to us, and can cause heavy metal poisoning.
0 kommentar(er)
