how do you do chemical equations? How do you know which elements join together and which ones don’t?

Question

how do you do chemical equations? How do you know which elements join together and which ones don’t?

In: 3

Answer 1

Electrons, electrons, electrons. Chemistry as a whole can basically be explained as the study of electron behavior.

Atoms want a specific number of electrons in each energy level. Finding this number is easy, it’s just the number of the energy level squared, multiplied by 2. So the first energy level can hold 2 electrons, the second can hold 8, and so on.

In general, atoms with too many electrons will either give them up or share them with other atoms that have too few. So by counting the valence electrons (the electrons in the outermost energy level) of each element, you can predict how that element will interact with other elements.

Full disclosure, I am not a chemist and the process gets much, much more complicated when dealing with interactions between larger molecules, but that’s basically the gist of it.