exchemist

Oh sure. Some of my best friends are................😁 I don't suggest - of course - that all electrical engineers are cranks, that would be absurd. In fact one of the best contributors on another forum I belong to is one. It is merely that science forum cranks are often, in my experience, electrical engineers. As to why, I have a hypothesis, but it is just speculation.

And the electrons liberated by the photoelectric effect go where, then? Either they attach to molecules in the air, forming anions, or they drop back into the substance they came from, in which case they don't help explain where your extra grounded electrons go.

But the electrons don't disappear even then. They convert some of the atoms and molecules in the earth to anions, that's all. But I see, depressingly, that you are yourself an electrical engineer. I seem always to be coming across electrical engineers on these forums with crank ideas about science. My heart sinks now when I learn some poster is an electrical engineer, because I wonder what nonsense may be coming. This ballocks of yours about there being no -ve ions is a vintage example of the genre.

How would it work for NaCl, then? What direction(s) would the bonds go in? Would you have diatomic molecules of Na-Cl? Ot a giant covalent structure like quartz or diamond? How would it dissolve in water? How would the solution conduct electricity and release chlorine at the anode? How could there be a covalent bond if there is no electron density between Na and Cl?

Crikey, looks like the Ed 209 from Robocop. "Just a glitch, Sir!"

Ah yes of course, it is the charge that causes the condensation.

Well, it's great that you are willing to learn, at least. As for experiments detecting -ve ions, I've already mentioned several pieces of evidence for ionic bonding in my previous post. One of the most simple, perhaps, is the production of the element at the anode of an electrochemical cell. If you dissolve common salt in water and electrolyse it with a torch battery, you can smell the chlorine gas evolved at the anode (the +ve electrode). This is evidence that Cl⁻ ions are present, which are neutralised by giving up an electron to the electrode, to form elemental chlorine. You can't do this with a covalently bonded compound. Secondly, Cl forms a single covalent bond in a wide range of compounds. (It can occasionally form covalent compounds with 3, 5 or 7 bonds, by bringing its 3d orbitals into play, but these compounds tend to be unstable or highly reactive.) However if you look at X-ray diffraction models of NaCl - which is highly stable of course - you will see that each chlorine "atom" is surrounded by 6 Na ions in an octahedral arrangement. And if you look at caesium chloride it is 8-coordinate. This does not correspond to any covalent bonding scheme for Cl. So the bonding must be non-directional, unlike covalent bonding. Thirdly, if you get an electron density map for these compounds, the electron density is a minimum between Cl and Na. This is in contrast to covalent bonding, where the electron density is especially high along the direction of the bonds. So it must be electrostatic in nature. Fourthly, metal chlorides are generally very soluble in polar solvents such as water. This is because the partial +ve charge on the hydrogen atoms can stabilise the -ve charge on the chloride ion (the part -ve charge on the oxygen atom does the same for the Na ion), enabling these compounds to dissolve readily in water, in spite of the strength of the bonding in the solid (as shown by the high melting point).

No that's quite wrong. We know that there are three main types of bonding: ionic, covalent and metallic - though there are often situations that are intermediate between these three archetypes. You can't just decide, arbitrarily, there is no such thing as ionic bonding. That's ignorant bullshit. Ionic bonding is evident from the types of structures formed (absence of finite numbers of fixed bonds, in ionic crystals), from electron density maps (X-ray diffraction) that show you there are areas of low, not high, electron density between atoms - and of course from simple properties such as electrical conductivity in the liquid phase, solubility in polar solvents, and so on. Chemical bonding is a huge and extremely well studied topic. You need at least to learn a bit about it before you start making these pronouncements.

I don't follow you. Atoms with incomplete valence shells can accept more electrons either by becoming negative ions (which really do have a net negative charge, as has been explained to you), or by accepting a share of more electrons through covalent bonding, which usually does not lead to a whole net -ve charge (though it can in the case of dative, or coordinate, bonding). I repeat: a chlorine atom accepts an extra electron and becomes an anion, which has a net -ve charge: 17 protons and 18 electrons. That is what you have in common table salt- and in hundred of other compounds of Chlorine with metallic elements. I really do not understand what your problem is with this.

Yes, that's what we call the "valence shell", i.e. the outermost, incompletely filled shell. It is electrons in the valence shell orbitals that take part in chemical bonding. Keep going: at this rate you may learn some chemistry!

Indeed. Somewhat counterintuitively, to a chemist, most elements have a +ve electron affinity. To your point, even alkali metals have a +ve electron affinity. But Chlorine, as it happens, has the greatest electron affinity of any element, I think. It has to be borne in mind that electron affinity applies to atoms, in the gas phase. In reality most elements are not generally found as single atoms - hydrogen being a case in point. Generally this ability to accept more electrons is satisfied via bonding.

Not at all. If the exclusion principle did not hold, all the electrons could pile into the lowest energy orbital - and there would be no chemistry. But one of the quantum numbers is a spin quantum number. Each orbital can accept 2 electrons, with opposed spin orientations, because that satisfies the exclusion principle. In Chlorine and the other halogens, there are 5 p electrons, so one orbital has only single occupancy and can thus accept another one.

Simple: an atom in which one of the unoccupied, or only singly occupied, orbitals accepts an extra electron from somewhere. I've already told you that the chlorine atom has an "electron affinity". What this means is that if it gains an extra electron, which can go into one of the p valence orbitals, since these are not fully occupied, the overall energy of the atom goes down, i.e, it is more stable than the neutral atom. That change is energetically favoured. In practice, in many chemical compounds, the extra electron is taken from a metal atom, which has a relatively low ionisation energy. So the overall change is to make a chemical compound that is more stable than atoms of the element. Na + Cl -> Na⁺Cl⁻ . An example of ionic bonding, one of the three main types of bonding in chemistry.

To remove the electron from a hydrogen atom you have to ionise it. This take a a lot of energy and does not happen until very high temperatures are reached, enough to turn hydrogen into a plasma. The ionisation energy is known: ~1300kJ/mol or ~13eV. So what you say is wrong. It is true that you get release of electrons from a metal when you heat it enough, via thermionic emission. This requires overcoming the work function for the material, for many metals of the order of 4eV. This is a lot less than the ionisation energy of hydrogen, but still high enough to require a significantly high temperature. Note that overcoming the work function is ionisation of only the topmost, tiny fraction of the most loosely bound electrons in a metallic bonding system, so it is far lower than the ionisation energy for an individual atom. Furthermore, what you say about the chlorine atom is also wrong. A neutral Cl atom has an electron affinity of ~350kJ/mol, which means that much energy is released when it captures an extra electron, i.e. the Cl- anion is more stable than the neutral atom. This anion has a net -ve charge of -1. Please stop confusing the photoelectric effect with thermal ionisation. They are quite different. Thermal ionisation requires electrons to be knocked out of the valence shell of the atom by collisions with other atoms or molecules. The photoelectric effect is due to absorption of radiation. As for the rest of what you say, it would really help if you could confine yourself to one wrong statement per post. 😆

No. This looks like mad ballocks.

I'm not sure there is anything new here. We all knew Trump would pretend the early Republican lead, and subsequent erosion of it by postal ballots, would be a sign of election-rigging. We also all know Bannon has wanted for years to bring down the whole structure and that he revels in the prospect of chaos and right wing dictatorship. Bannon is a nutter.

Yes @Halc has pinpointed the flaw in your analysis. You have omitted the torque that is also exerted at your "point of application of the repulsive force". This will be a clockwise torque. Alternatively, taking your brown construction as a rigid body, it should be obvious that applying two opposite forces (whether from magnets or anything else) along the diameter will simply tend to squeeze it and will not cause any rotation, regardless of its shape.

What's wrong with you? In the time you have spent asking about this perfectly simple procedure, you could have already done it several times over. Just tip it in and stir it up. Use a glass container, so you see when all the crystals have disappeared from the bottom.

Ah. Soot is a very black and therefore good absorber of radiation, converting it to heat. What may be happening is the soot layer may be warming and expanding and moving on the glass surface via a stick-slip process.

If you tell us what you have done, or found out, some of us might be intrigued. But if you are going be all coy about it we will lose interest rapidly.

Oh that's easy. There are ~6.25 x 10¹⁸ electrons in one Coulomb of electric charge and 1 amp = 1 Coulomb/sec. You can find estimates on the internet for the current in amps in a lightning discharge. Bear in mind that, as current is a rate of flow of charge, you can get very high currents without necessarily transferring enormous amounts of charge, if that current only flows for a fraction of a second.

In an electric current, the electrons move through the conductor very slowly, not at the speed of light. As I understand it, what moves fast through a conductor is any signal, i.e. any change to the rate of flow at one end propagates very fast to the other end, because the electrons in between can be though of as essentially incompressible. Since current is a measure of the charge passing a given point per unit time, e.g, amps = Coulombs/sec, a greater current can be achieved by more electrons moving, as well as by a greater speed of motion. But some of the physicists here may be able to explain better than I can.

John, if you are a student, as you represented yourself as being earlier, the first rule is RTFQ, Read The ----ing Question. This thread is about interpreting NMR spectra. But I'm wondering now if you are a 'bot, because of your inane suggestion that you can analyse a spectrum by wet chemistry methods.

Yes, fair enough, that makes sense, in the wave picture at any rate.

Are you trying to tell me that electrons in an atomic or molecular orbital have kinetic energy without motion? How does that work?