Physics is Chemistry and Chemistry is Physics

Hello Humans! Today, I've read my O-Chem textbook for a solid 2-3 hours, and I am nowhere near finished with it. I want to read it through the night so that I can learn all of the truths it holds inside its pages. One really cool thing that I learned today by reading my O-Chem textbook, well, it's more like it was made clear, has to do with hybrid orbitals. For those of you who don't know what a hybrid orbital, it requires quite a bit of background, and I'm going to do my best to explain it. Remember when I told you that valence electrons were a lie? Well, it's a lie only told to help non-science brains wrap their head around the concept of electrons. When you were young you would draw your atoms with electrons going around the nucleus in circles, or traceable paths. You probably believed that the electrons stayed on the path you drew, because that made the most sense in you little brain. Well, in reality, electrons, like photons are both a wave and a particle. They dwell in my favorite world: The Quantum World. Because they are both a wave and a particle, their position at any given time cannot be directly pin-pointed. Scientists who were much smarter than me, came up with "electron clouds," or more commonly known as orbitals. Orbitals are just a area where the probability of finding the electron in a given time is very high. When atoms bond, it's through hybrid orbitals, which are made when the two orbitals combine. My professor last year described it as a smoothie. You put a 2s orbital in from one atom and a 2p orbital in from a different atom, and BANG! You now have a 2sp hybrid orbital. I just accepted this as a scientific fact and moved on with my life, but didn't do particularly good in that section of the class and test. But, my O-Chem textbook explained it in a really simple way that always makes sense in my brain: PHYSICS.

Here's how it works. Since the electrons are both particles and waves, they have wave-like properties. And when the two amplitudes end up in the exact same position, they combine, and the two amplitudes become a "super-amplitude." But, when the two amplitudes are opposite of each other, they combine, which in turn cancels the wave out. This is formerly known as "Constructive and Destructive Interference," and something that I learned to understand VERY well last year in Physics. My O-Chem textbook even had a similar graph to the one shown below, which is a wave graph that we constantly used in Physics. And now back to the electrons that act as waves. The same thing happens to the wave-like electrons: When the waves of the electrons are in the same position, they create a "super-amplitude," which is where the electron cloud is biggest and most dense. But when the waves of the electrons are opposite, they cancel each other out, creating the node where no electron dwells.

When the atoms combine, there are "bonding molecular orbitals," and "anti-bonding molecular orbitals," still described by these simple waves. The anti-bonding molecular orbital is just where the two electrons that are trying to form a bond, have opposite wave amplitudes. The bonding molecular orbitals is then where the two electrons that are trying to form a bond have the same wave amplitudes. So once again, I would like to thank my best friend Physics for helping Chemistry become much more clear in my brain. It makes me really want to change from BioChemical Engineering to Physical Chemistry. Who knows what the future holds? Stay wild, flower child.