from the "HOW DO YOU KNOW?" perspective
We go slowly through the first topics in the text that have to do with bonding, because we want to use this as a training ground for thinking carefully and demanding rigor from anyone who presumes to act as an authority - also because a proper understanding of bonding is absolutely crucial to mastering organic chemistry as we understand it in Chem 125.
As an example of how we expect you to read carefully, here are some questions that might occur to you as you read, and comments relevant to the material in Chapter 1 of Jones 2nd edition. You don't have to write out answers to the questions, but we'll expect you to know the answers.
You may well come up with other questions. If so ask them to your friends, course alumni, one or several of the TAs, Dr. McBride, or someone more authoritative until you get a satisfactory answer. If the answer has to be, "We'll get to that later", remember the question and hold us to the promise. If you get no satisfactory answer at all, be suspicious.
The questions that have already been touched on in class and those in red you should be able to answer (perhaps with help from your friends or TAs). The questions in blue should be troubling you as you read the text, we will address them later.
The assumption of Chapter 1 in the text seems to be that we can review this material about atoms and bonding quickly, because we already know the answers from a previous course. Is this true?
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Comment or question to be concerned about, question to answer, touched on in class already, something that will come up in class later |
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Where did Dalton get the atom idea? |
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How did Thomson discover the electron? |
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Why did Thomson postulate a "pudding" atom? |
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How did Rutherford demolish the pudding? |
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Where did Bohr get the planetary idea? Is it right? |
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The bottle analogy will turn out to be very apt. |
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For us this definition of orbital will be anathema. It is something very definite, and far from indeterminate. It is definitely not "the region of space occupied by an electron" Just wait. |
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Assuming that atoms are made up of nuclei and electrons. |
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Assuming Coulomb's law |
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Notice that Z is redundant. Why? |
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Why are there energy levels? |
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Why are filled outer subshells stable? Stable compared to what? |
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Is the octet rule just an hypothesis? |
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What is "highly schematic" Figure 1.1 showing? Is the diagram an efficient one for showing this? |
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Consider the data in Table 1.1 with regard to forming NaF. It costs 5.14 eV (IP) to take an electron away from Na and form Na+ with a complete octet. The electron gains back 3.34 eV (EA) by completing the octet on F. But this is still a losing deal. What gives? Why should Na react with F? |
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