Why does the amount of protons in an element wildly change its properties? For example: why is two protons a gas, but suddenly three protons is a metallic solid?
In: 109
I think the main two sources of an element’s properties are:
* mass/density
* electric
Mass/density:
If something has more protons, then it is heavier per atom. Atoms with more protons do take up a bit more space, but they get heavier moreso than they take up more space, so they are much denser. This factors greatly into things like whether they are a gas/liquid/solid at room temperature, for instance.
Electric:
We think of ‘electric’ meaning relating to electric power running through wires, but in atoms, the proton is charged. This attracts electrons to come and surround the atom.
The electrons hang around the outside of the atom, and will therefore be the first to interact with other atoms, and greatly effecting how elements effect each other at the microscopic level.
Electricity is very different to magnetism, but as a quick analogy, but the protons and electrions are a little bit like tiny magnets are in&around each atom, pushing and pulling in specific ways.
Electrons have some strange properties, one of which is how they absolutely insist on all being in a different situation, except that they don’t mind existing in pairs* . They actually *cannot* be in the same situation as each other in anything more than pairs – it isn’t just a mild preference, but it is *physically impossible*. We call it the *Exclusion Principle* (often with the name ‘Pauli’, after the scientist that worked this out in 1925.)
Imagine if every room in a building could never have more than 2 people in them. If someone tries to enter a room with 2 people in it, *they can’t* (as if an invisible wall is at the door), and so they’d need to order someone else to leave first, or if you want to move a lot of people in a line full of full rooms, you’d need to arrange for 1 person in every room to step one room across at the same time, or other highly specific behaviours like that.
At a microscopic level, electrons have to follow patterns of movement sort of like that example [Not exactly, like that example, but kinda that weirdly specific.] This can force them to do some *very specific* interactions, as so many options are cut off from them when they meet other atoms. The moves that are possible thus greatly influences how electrons contribute to bonding atoms together to form molecules or crystals and so on.
* They can pair up because they have an internal property we call “spin”, which can be either “up” or “down”**, so a pair of electrons can be in the same state, except with different spins.
** Uh, it is far more complicated than there being only up and down, but for quantum-weirdness reasons we can and should pretend it is this simple.
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