V25.0109: General Chemistry I (Honors)

Notes for Lecture 10

In this part of the course, we will set aside quantum mechanics briefly and discuss the so-called classical theory of chemical bonding. In our crude classical picture, electrons are viewed as point particles that move in stable classical orbits determined by Newton's second law around the atoms in a molecule. Because the nuclei are several thousand times more massive than electrons, we regard the nuclei as fixed on the time scale of significant ``classical'' electron motion.

Despite our crude classical picture, however, a conceptually useful definition of chemical bonding can be stated that relies on the relatively high mobility of the electrons compared to the nuclei:

Chemical bonds are formed either by one atom's transferring electrons to another atom or by two atoms' sharing electrons between them, or something in between these two situations.