Hello everyone. I have always wanted to know how exactly are dishwashing soap, hand soap, cleaning soap are able to kill or remove harmful bacteria from whatever we are using it for?
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I’m gonna do an ELI10 because understanding this base concept is pretty useful.
In general, there are two kinds of molecules. Polar and non polar. Polar molecules have the electrical charges unbalanced across them, which makes them like little magnets. Non polar molecules do not have this charge imbalance. Good examples are water and oil, with water being polar and oil being non polar.
Each type of molecule loves sticking to itself, but *hates* sticking to the other. This is actually the half of the “oil doesn’t mix with water” thing. Not only is the oil less dense than water, but they refuse to intermingle because they aren’t the same type of molecule.
This presents a problem, though. Water is great at cleaning polar stuff off of things, but what about non polar stuff? That’s where soap comes in. Soap is really weird. One end of the soap is polar, but the other end is non polar. So it can stick to both types of molecule. What soap will do in water is go around and make tiny little corrals around all the non polar stuff, completely surrounding it in microscopic coating. The inside of the corral is non-polar and sticks to the debris, but the outside is polar. This means that water can grab the entire corral like it’s one massive molecule and sweep it away.
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