water

[miriam_e]

Does anybody here know why the water molecule resembles Mickey Mouse? That is, why do the two hydrogen atoms stick onto the oxygen atom at 120° instead the apparently more obvious 180°. This has puzzled me since I was very young and I've never heard a good explanation of it. I've heard people say it is to do with the shapes of electron orbitals, but then usually dismissed as too complex to explain, which always sounds suspiciously like "I don't understand it myself so I won't reveal my ignorance to you". In my experience most concepts have fairly simple ideas at their heart. The trick is in finding the way to convey that.

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Re: BSc. to the rescuuuuueeee!!!

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :)

That is a completely different explanation to what I was expecting. I'd somehow been led to feel (through my own ignorance or others' hints) that it was something to do with the shapes of the electron shells. But your explanation has a nice simplicity to it that I can "touch". I can just push and pull those charges in my mind as they wobble and spin about and I can feel that could well tend to balance at that angle. Cool!

Of course I now have more lines of questioning (why electrons pair -- another thing I often wondered, why keeping the two outer-shell electrons together maintains lower energy than letting them go elsewhere, etc), but that is always the way, isn't it.

I love that description of knowledge as being like a spotlight on the floor of a large dark area. The illuminated area is what you know and the darkness outside it is what you don't know. The edge of the circle represents the questions you have. As you enlarge your knowledge, so your questions grow. A lovely paradox.