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Antoine lavoisier atomic theory3/24/2024 Imagine, for a moment, that you have a bunch of balloons made up of two sausage-shaped balloons and two round ones, all attached at the neck. But it doesn’t, and the reason it doesn’t is that the oxygen atom in the middle has two pairs of electrons which aren’t involved in bonding – which chemists call ‘ lone pairs‘. Now, you might imagine that a molecule with the formula H 2O would have its atoms arranged in a straight line, like this: H–O–H. We need to start with the structure of water. Ice crystals on a wall in Oxfordshire, UK, in November 2021Īs you can (hopefully) see, there’s some regularity to the individual crystals, but they’re sort of growing all over the place. In fact, it was snowing here just yesterday, which means I have photos! Of course, ice naturally forms at 0 ℃ at standard atmospheric pressure, but the form we’re most familiar with looks, to the naked eye at least, rather more random. This form of ice is found on dead wood, and it has a few other names, including ice wool or frost beard. The story behind hair ice is a fascinating one, and not something I could truly cover in 272 characters – so here’s the slightly longer version… But this time, I’m going to focus on its solid state: ice.Ī few days ago I stumbled across some beautiful images of hair ice, which prompted me to make a #272sci Twitter post (keep an eye on that hashtag for similar small bits of interesting science). Which means that November is always an excellent time to talk about water. Hair ice, in which ice crystals grow in thread-like structures, can be found at northerly latitudes in broadleaf forests I’ve written about water before and in particular, if you’ve been paying very close attention, you might remember that November 12th marks the anniversary of the day, in 1783, that Antoine Lavoisier formally declared water to be a compound rather than an element.
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