Thursday, January 8, 2015

2015-01-08: Never to late to start again or learn something new.

Two for one today:

Liquid clear N2
is not diamagnetic
due to electron config.

Liquid blue O2
due to MO Theory is
paramagnetic.


I was never taught para- or dia-magnetism in high school or college.  I do remember by college chemistry professor telling us that liquid oxygen is magnetic and showing us a video of it [rather that doing the demo live which is a shame because I don't recall him ever doing a demo].  When I started teaching I learned about it from a demonstration book A Demo a Day published by Flinn Scientific and did the demo the next school year and explained it according to the demo book and via electron configurations.  However I was never able to understand why O2 is paramagnetic and N2 is diamagnetic: it part because I focused on electron configurations of the individual atoms and in part because it is explained much better by MO theory.  I actually have to give credit here to a Yahoo Answers for pointing me to MO theory, and then I went from there to work it out on my own.  Prior to reading that I read several really bad explanations, in addition to the bad ones I already knew that pointed to the electron configurations of individual atoms/elements and not their compounds/molecules.

No comments:

Post a Comment