Metallic nature

what I want to do in this video is discuss what it means to be a metal or metallic in nature so first let's just think about the the metals that we encounter in everyday life or based on our experience the things that we associate with being a metal so the elements that really jump out at us at metals we always refer to hey that's a metal or that's metallic are things like iron iron or nickel or copper or silver or gold or aluminum or at least for me these are the ones that immediately pop out as oh hey these are I've seen these things before and I they all feel like metals to me but else think about what is what what's true about these things and as we'll see many other elements on the periodic table that give them this metallic nature what do we associate with having a metallic nature well what is that these things can be shiny these things tend to be shiny that there's kind of a gloss when light shines on it they're not just kind of a matte color they'd look metallic literally that's the sometimes a word that's used where it has a metallic shininess to it another thing that we associate with it is that they tend to be they tend to be fairly dense if I take a metal a block of a metal and if I drop it into water I imagine that sinking that it's not floating on top of the water we also imagine them having a very high melting point that they tend to be solid at room temperature solid at room room temperature and as we'll see this is true of all metals except for one of them which is mercury which is shiny but at room temperature as you might be familiar is in its liquid in its liquid form now the other things that I associate with a metal is that I can make things out of them pretty I can bend them and shape them in different ways if I think of aluminum foil I can bend it it's not going to it's not just going to crack I can brand it and put into different shapes even things like iron it might take a lot of pressure to do it but they're bendable they're malleable and definitely you know things like gold and silver and copper you can actually mold into different types of jewelry if you if you put pressure on it it's more likely to bend then crack and just kind of shear off so let's put malleability they're malleable malleable and the other thing that I associate with metals is that they conduct electricity well conduct conduct electricity a place that you'll see metal in your life is if you open up your electronics you'll see wires that might be made out of copper or you might have components that are made out of other metals like gold or silver or whatever else so let's given that you know this is these are some of the properties that we associate with metals let's think about what's happening at the atomic level to give these elements this these properties the way I think about it let's just emit let's just go with copper for a second let's just imagine a block of kamar copper at the atomic level so let's say this is one copper nucleus right over there and it has it's sea of electrons it has its sea of electrons just like or not at sea of electrons it has all of its electrons and the various orbitals we'll talk about sea of electrons in a second but this is kind of it's cloud of electrons I should say so this is electron cloud so the electrons are just jumping around in this cloud it's really a probability density or it's there's kind of a certain probability that could be at any point in that cloud and so let's imagine a big solid piece of copper so you would have a bunch of these you would have a bunch of these all together all forming the solid and what allows metals to be malleable to do things like conduct electrons or conduct electricity which is the movement of electrons is essentially for the for them that they're very willing to share electrons with each other by sharing electrons so you can imagine this is one copper atom that's another let's say they're sharing some electrons that's what allows the electricity or this flow of electrons to happen if these electrons are loosely bound then if you put a potential difference of voltage let's say that you put a potential difference so that this side is more negative and then this side is more positive then the electrons are going to want to get away from the negative charge move towards the positive charge and if they're relatively freely bound they can kind of move from one cloud to the next and you kind of end up having what's often called AC see of electrons let me write that down you have a sea of electrons of electrons which makes which would make this conductive and that's why you see so much wire made out of copper and the sea of electrons is also what makes it malleable if someone were to put if someone you know on this side would have put a lot of pressure this way and on that side put a lot of pressure that way things that are rigid would just kind of crack and break right would just break right over there but because you have the sea of electrons it allows it to be malleable this part might just bend down a little bit that Bart might bend up but they're not going to the metallic bond is not going to break and so given that this metallic nature really comes from the willingness of these atoms to share electrons with each other to create the sea of electrons I encourage you to pause this video and think about which which atoms on the periodic table which elements are more likely to do that to share electrons with others and with each other and really this is the same principle that we thought about ionization energy and electronegativity so pause the video so I'm assuming you've you've had a go at it so which elect the which elements are most likely to share electrons well we've already seen that if we're on the left side of the periodic table of elements Group one for example they only have one valence electron it would be very hard for them to get enough electrons to complete that outer shell and if they get rid of that one valence electron they can go to a more stable state so they really want to give away electrons and the ones over here they're so close if we're talking about the if we talk about the halogens there one electron away from completing their outer shell they are greedy they want to hog these electrons they tend to be electronegative the noble gases they're done they definitely don't want to share electrons with anyone they're kind of in a very stable state now the other thing that we've talked about is as we go down a group arm our atoms are getting larger and larger and larger so the outermost that 55th electron in cesium is much more loosely bound because it's further away then they say the third electron in lithium so just as we saw as the elements in this bottom left have a very low ionization energies very it doesn't take must energy to remove an electron from them these are the ones that are most likely to share electrons and these actually have the highest metallic nature so high high metallic high metallic nature and the ones on the top right these are going to be the opposite they're very unlikely to share electrons these are very electronegative they have a very high ionization energy they have a low metallic nature so I could imagine some things are popping into your brain at this point you know we started thinking of the the the elements that in our every day of life we associate with with metals but what I'm saying is that these things over here haven't even higher metallic nature but what about something like calcium you know every day when I imagined when I typically or when a lot of people imagine calcium they think of kind of a chalky white chalky substance very rigid not very malleable not very good not very shiny not very good at conducting electricity what I mean based on what I just told you this would have a higher metallic nature than something like aluminum well you have to remind yourself is that that what you see is not actually pure calcium that that kind of chalky thing that's calcium carbonate pure calcium actually this is actually a picture of pure calcium and it is shiny it does have these metallic properties so the general trend here is that all of these this is very high metallic nature and these are very low metallic nature which also makes you probably realize well most of the periodic table is a metal of some form if aluminum is a metal and all of these things have a higher have a higher metallic nature than all of this stuff all of this stuff are metals and that is the case the s-block the d-block the f-block these are all metals and then about a good chunk of the p-block a good chunk of the p-block are considered metals and then these are kind of these are kind of sometimes referred to as metalloids and the this only this section of the periodic table is not considered well that makes sense the noble gases they are gases they don't they're not very reactive they don't bond so they don't form kind of a structure that can even do this type of thing and these other ones over here even you know carbon when it is it formed a lattice it does not conduct electricity well it's not so it tends to not be so malleable if you think about something like a diamond or if you think about a diamond might be the best example of that so anyway hopefully this gives you a sense of metallic nature and the trends in the periodic table high metallic nature and you go to the top right lower and lower metallic nature