Super Common Mistake: Diatomic Elements

let me talk about a big question that a lot of people have with the

diatomic

elements

, these are the

diatomic

elements

, there are seven of them here and they are bromine, iodine, nitrogen, chlorine, hydrogen, oxygen and phlorine. Now diatomic elements are special because they are never found alone. an atom of a datomic element by itself, you always find them in pairs, okay, so you get br2 I2 N2 etc., the big idea here is, for oxygen, gaseous oxygen, you never find a single oxygen atom floating around around, you always find it paired. with another oxygen atom forming a molecule with two oxygen atoms and that is O2 and that is what is floating.

Well, after learning about diatomic elements, it can be a little confusing when you come across formulas for chemical compounds like these. Well, all these formulas contain. diatomic elements but there is only one atom of them, so here we have an oxygen atom, a chlorine atom, a nitrogen atom, a bromine atom, can you see why this is a little confusing because here they are in pairs and here Are they individual? I show you some comments that I have received on my videos that express this confusion, okay, one person asks how is it possible that H2O only has one oxygen atom.

I thought oxygen was a diatomic element, so you can't just have one, you always have to have two, okay. now talking about libr here someone else asks wait, shouldn't it be Li br2? Because bromine is diatomic, so atoms must always come in pairs. So what is going on here? How come we say diatomic elements have to come in pairs and then? We write all these formulas where we only have one atom of a datomic element, these are great questions, let's talk about this, so here's something important that sometimes is like the missing piece for people to understand diatomic elements, atoms of datomic elements only need to pair if they are alone and not connected to any other element, okay, so let me show you what I mean, let's take nitrogen gas.

Nitrogen gas is made of just nitrogen, so if we take a small sample of nitrogen gas and zoom in on it. millions and millions of times to be able to see the atoms that make up nitrogen gas, we would see that the atoms are connected to each other in pairs of two, well, this is what nitrogen gas would look like, this is what the atoms in the gas look like nitrogen here we only have nitrogen, the nitrogen atoms are paired, if we looked at nitrogen gas we wouldn't see something like this where the nitrogen atoms would float individually, the same goes for liquid bromine which is made of just bromine.

Zoom in on a small drop of liquid bromine and it looks like this: BR atoms are connected to each other in pairs. It wouldn't look like that with BR atoms. The individual nitrogen and bromine have to pair up because these contain nitrogen gas. Liquid bromine only contains this element there is only nitrogen here there is only bromine here so the atoms have to pair up but if the datomic elements are connected to other elements they do not need to pair up correctly this is how we can have H2O with only one oxygen atom because This is either not just connected to another one or it's connected to two hydrogens, which is totally fine, this chlorine here we can have one because it's connected not only to chlorine but also to sodium and that's true with these others, so The big problem with the datomic elements is that they only need to be paired if they are only connected to each other.

Okay, two nitrogens have to pair up. Two bromines have to pair, but if they connect with other elements, they don't. They don't have to be in pairs, so all of these chemical formulas are totally fine if there is another element there, don't worry about pairing only if that element is alone.