Chemistry

You know how there are some things, when you drop them on the floor, that shatter, into a million pieces. like glass, or porcelain. but other things, like playdough, or bread, or metal, either stay together or (under extreme force in some cases) dent, or meld wherever it hit the ground. the reason for this difference is because of how the atoms bond. my favourite type of bond is in the first case, with things that shatter.

imagine every atom has a charge. some are negative, some are positive, and some are neutral. picture a sliding scale from really negative, to slightly negative, to slightly positive, to really positive. now, its important to know that positive and negative things attract. negative things have too much of something and positive things want that something. and the more positive or negative something is, the bigger the difference between the opposite charges, the stronger the attraction. when 2 especially positive/negative atoms bond, they form something called an ionic bond. This kind of bond can be strong, but it depends entirely on the strength of attraction between the 2, which again, depends on how positive or negative they are.

now it is also important to know that atoms of the same charge (so positive + positive, negative + negative) repel each other. they positively hate each other. think of magnets. one side sticks and the other side repels. if you have an object made up entirely of ironic bonds, and half the atoms attract each other, but the other half repel each other, how do they make an object??

well, picture a chess board. the white squares are negative, the black squares are positive. see how black is always touching white, but never another black? and the same with the white squares? thats how ionic compounds work.

now, again, this entirely depends on the strength of the ionic bond (as some are so strong that the object, when dropped, will not shatter on impact). Imagine that checker board again, perhaps in a cube. each white/black square is its own mini cube and held together with the others by the strength of both the attraction between white and black, and the repulsion between white/white and black/black. if you dropped the cube, the impact might be enough to shift the position of some of those squares. and then what would happen? the second the squares were shifted so that white touches white (negative touches negative) and black touches black (positive touches positive) they would immidiately repel and push each other so far away the entire thing would shatter. and thats just what it does!!!