if we are mostly made of carbon and hydrogen(both of them looks like rocks in their solid form)why do we look and feel vastly different?
In: 0
Well firstly your premise is wrong. Hydrogen by itself is a colorless transparent gas so I don’t know where you saw it “looks like rocks”.
And secondly, the difference is because the *arrangement* of atoms matters.
**ELI5:**
It’s like lego bricks. I can make the exact same type of bricks into a staircase or a long beam or a wall. It’s all about how they’re put together. Picture carbon as a 2×4 brick and hydrogen is a 2×2 brick. You can make a lot of different things depending on how you attach them.
**ELI Highschool:**
Sodium atoms by themselves make a shiny silver metal that explodes on contact with water. Chlorine atoms form an extremely toxic yellow-green gas. But combine one atom of sodium and one chlorine and you get sodium chloride – a safe non-reactive substance known as table salt. You eat it every day.
The difference is the arrangement. Sodium is reactive because it has just one electron more than an amount that would make a really nice stable arrangement. So it REALLY wants to get rid of one electron. It will shove that electron onto pretty much anything, causing a chemical reaction. Chlorine is just one electron short of an amount that would be nice and stable. So it REALLY wants one one electron. It will rip one away from almost anything, causing a chemical reaction. In sodium chloride, the sodium has given its one extra electron to chlorine, which needed one more. Now they’re both happy, which makes the overall substance very non-reactive.
The bottom line here is that a substance gets its properties from the overall arrangement of atoms, which can be very different from the properties those atoms would have in isolation (before reacting with each other and forming structures).
Latest Answers