How come salt doesn’t turn into bleach on contact with air, since the only thing separating them chemically is a single oxygen atom?
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I think this question is really showing a fundamental mistake in chemistry teaching/understanding. The mistake is that most people tend to think of atoms as parts in machines or components in cakes etc. Like, if I put together a cogwheel and a pedal with two wheels, you get a bike, so adding one more wheel must result on a tricycle, right? Or adding more sugar to a cake will make it sweeter, right? So then why an extra oxygen in water makes it hydrogen peroxide?
So the weird thing in chemistry is that it works entirely different from what our everyday world does. Imagine you take a microwave oven and saw it into halves. And instead of having two half microwaves, boom, it becomes a t-shirt and a bar of soap. You can do it back together, get a soap and a t-shirt, force them together and whoop, it’s a microwave! However if you force the same soap together with a wristwatch, you get a light bulb. Or, let’s say you press together two soap bars and you get a glass jar.
The thing what I want to say is that absolutely no point looking at atoms as spare parts that are hanging around and can just added or removed freely. They don’t contribute to the final product in a simple way as an extra wheel addition would contribute to a tricycle. There are of course rules, that imaginary “soap bar” doesn’t do random stuff, but you have rules how to force the soap bar out of the glass jar, and how to force it into the t-shirt in order to get your microwave. And the rules are described by the chemical reactions.
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