SurfSciGuy

Whats the stuff they use in laserquest / megzone?

Good stuff guys! makes you wonder what HI is like?

Which atom makes the sp hybrid (an O I presume)? Molecules or multiatomic ions cannot have an electronegativity as such (it is an elemental property). Nitrate ions do not oxidise Fluorine to F+. The Fluorine is the most electronegative element in the system and hence it will carry a delta -ve charge in a polar covalent bond (with the O I think). Fluorine has the highest non-noble gas first ionization energy (The noble gases are very difficult to ionise, in fact they are very difficult to do anything with) so it is not easy to ionise at all!

The bond lengths are the same, but in both C=O bonds the bonding electron density maximum is shifted towards the oxygens. The overall molecule is non-polar, but the individual C=O bonds are polar. Oxygen is more electronegative than Carbon so it will pull electrons towards it. It is a mistake to try and use oxidation numbers to predict the effect of electronegativity (which is an effect of the charge denisty of the nucleus).

There is no "say" about it, that is a fundamental rule of oxidation state theory, which as I have said is only an approximation (as there is no discete ionic states in the molecules). Yes it is! The F atom is the most electronegative in the molecule so it will pull electron density towards it. You have massively oversimplified the model of the molecule by assuming that it is a discrete pair of ions, this is incorrect. Quantum modelling calculations (which are also inaccurate, but a damn site better than oxidation state theory) show that the flourine has significant electron density around it in the ground state (indicating that it probably carries a delta - partial charge). The outer electrons are most likely to be dissociated over the molecule (i.e. full charges are unlikely to reside on one individual atom. A bond between oxygen and fluorine will be polarised with the flourine having a delta -ve charge (and, neccesarily, the oxygen having a delta +ve charge) because fluorine is more electronegative (i.e. it's nucleus has a higher charge denisty and very low inner shell shielding effects and so exerts a larger attractive force than the oxygen nucleus on the bonding electrons).

Yeah, you missed the part about it getting rejected cos you're not american.

It takes less time at least.

Exactly, so I can answer in two different ways. There is no indication as to the preference of the proposer for which he would like you to put down.

I wonder if you could use supercritical fluids to provide solvation?

OMG! I was right, flippin 'eck that's not happened to me for a while!

Quite. I put down the one I'm working on (PhD) but I have an undergraduate Masters degree (I can hear the americans going wtf? now...).

You can also get quantum confinement of electrons too (in so-called "quantum dots"). Compound particles often have band structures rather than totally discreet levels, as the particulate size is decreased to the nano-scale, the number of atoms in the particles becomes smaller and the band structure slowly becomes more discreet (i.e. the electrons in the particle become more locally associated with one atom) this leads to different light scattering behaviour as the excitation energies become more discreet. This manifests itself through the materials often going from black to white (through the visible spectrum of colours) as particulate sizes is decrease. It is a very interesting phenomenon.

Not neccesarily. In a sufficiently large ligand field, the electron repulsion energy is smaller than the crystal field splitting, thus for certain electron configurations for certain geometries (such as 6d for octahedral field and 4d for tetrahedral field) it is possible to have fully paired electrons in a non-full d shell. That is an example of an excited state of a 4d10 metal, 4d10 is not a transition metal electron configuration (the d shell is full). Also note that, in transition metal complexes, the simple atomic orbitals no longer exist, so your excited state configuration is incorrect for a complex (which is what the discussion is concerned with).