The Water Molecule

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Molecules. You might be asking yourself, "What can you do with atoms?" Well, the fun is just beginning. Atoms are the building blocks for everything we know. So if you ever loved playing with blocks, then you’ll love what atoms can do. You can put atoms together just like building blocks. But when you put atoms together, they are called molecules. Let’s see how we can build some simple molecules.

One molecule that is easy and fun to start with is water. Water is made out of two atoms of Hydrogen and one atom of Oxygen. The chemical name for water is H2O. H stands for the Hydrogen, and O stands for Oxygen. The number 2 means that there are two Hydrogen atoms. Two Hydrogen atoms and one Oxygen atom are shown below:

Now there is a trick to building molecules. Orbits are capable of having a maximum of two electrons. Sometimes an orbit will only have one electron in it. But we can think of this electron as being lonely. It will want to have another electron in the same orbit. And if another electron comes along and makes a pair of electrons in one orbit, then we can consider the electrons to be happy. Just remember that electrons always want to be in pairs. If you look at Hydrogen, you can see that it has one electron in the 1S orbital. It is a lonely electron. Oxygen also has one electron in two of its P orbitals. In this case, the 1S has two electrons, the 2S has two electrons, the Py has two electrons while the Px and the Pz have only one electron each. The Px and Pz electrons are both lonely. No electron wants to be lonely, so a wonderful thing happens between Oxygen and the two Hydrogens. They share the electrons (See below). One of the Hydrogens is sharing an electron with the Px orbit, and the other Hydrogen is sharing an electron with the Pz orbit. Now all the electrons are happy. They are all in pairs. They will stay that way until something forces them away. That is the secret to building all molecules, sharing electrons.

You can distinguish atoms from molecules in the game by looking at the S orbits. If all the S orbits are in concentric circles then you have an atom. If the S orbits are not concentric and you see an S orbit that lies outside another S orbit, then you have a molecule. There are links to other molecules presented below.