Why does the formation of soap allow it to pick up different items?
In: Chemistry
It looks like you’re thinking binary: something has to be either polar or non-polar, it can’t be both one thing and the opposite. But think of it like a shoestring. Can a shoe-string be both frayed and non-frayed? Yes: frayed at one end, not frayed at the other end. Pokey and pointed at one end and the opposite on the other, soft and spread out.
To get just a teensy more complicated, more ELI6, “polar” is just a label, and it’s not being applied to the whole molecule all together, but to the two ends: one can be polar and the other not. The Q is: what kind of ***local*** electrical field is there at one end or the other of the molecule? Does the *local* (confined to that end) field have a neat attractive charge in its *immediate* surroundings? If I glue a one-inch magnet to one end of a foot-long wooden stick, one end of the end result is magnetic and the other not. Soap is like that.
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