Edit: please explain like I am actually five.
In: 2979
Silicon is sticky. It’s sticks to everything but itself. Liquid silicon doesn’t like sticking to itself.
I have an oven mitt made of silicon. It baffles me that something so thin and flexible can prevent extreme heat transfer. Can’t even feel a 450f pan through it.
The best explanation is just that “silicone” is a broad category. Think of all of the things you make from crude oil (the stuff that’s pumped out of the ground). Gasoline, petroleum jelly (Vaseline), and asphalt (road tar) are all part of that crude oil, and can be purified out by carefully boiling that material that’s pumped out of the ground. If you alter it even more, you can make plastics out of it – or even transform it into things like food colorings.
In this analogy, silicone lubricant is like gasoline, while non-slip silicone rubber is more like plastic. Other silicone products (a great example would be the moldable silicone earplugs you can get in the store) are more like petroleum jelly. They’re all made from the same base material, but their properties are selected by altering the molecules in different ways.
How is “New Shimmer” a floor wax AND a dessert topping?
Nobody knows
Silicon sticks to everything except silicon. So if you coat two things in silicon then the silicon slides over silicon. So suddenly you have a lubricant.
Saying “silicone” is like saying “hydrocarbon” . It’s not very specific. There are silicones that are solids, liquids, glues, adhesives , lubricants etc
Being somewhat “sticky” is an important property of most lubricants. If lubricants aren’t sticky, they just flow off the thing you’re trying to lubricate.
Also, as others are pointing out, “silicone” is a *class* of chemical (not to be confused with “silica” AKA “silicon dioxide”, which is one of the primary components of sand). Like “plastic”, there are many many different kinds of “silicone”. Some silicones form grippy coatings, while other silicones are good for slippery lubricants.
You just answered your own question. Here’s another what is Teflon?
Silica is kind of like carbon in many ways, and makes nice chains of molecules (polymerizes in certain chemical situations). If you play with the secondary constituents of that polymer (add certain organic functional groups to a basic chain of Si-O-Si-O-Si), you can vary the nature of the silicone polymers and change its physical properties. These polymer compounds are called polysiloxanes, or “silocone” for general use. Different structures are quite possible, from platy sheets to long thin chains to 3D structures.
Although all basically the same idea, the details of the materials are different, and it is how the polymers form together in detail which matters to how the material will function, physically.
Games with chemistry.
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