🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan12.170015.12539@cs.sfu.ca> jones@cs.sfu.ca (John Jones)  
writes:
|Why is mercury a liquid, while its neighbours in the periodic table
|are high-melting-point solids?  A simple answer might be that the
|interatomic bonds in mercury are unusually weak, but then what is
|responsible for the weakness of these bonds?

From Petrucci & Harwood's "General Chemistry" 6th ed. (Macmillan, 1992) which  
I am currently preparing to use: (pg. 346)
"The reason why mercury is a liquid at room temperature is something of a  
mystery and not completely understood. ... In atoms of high atomic number,  
because of the high nuclear charge, electrons that come close to the nucleus  
are accelerated to high speeds, and their masses increase" 
The text explains that the relativistic effect makes the 6s electrons  
especially stable so that the metallic bonding is too weak to stabilize a  
crystalline solid structure and "mercury becomes almost as stable as a noble  
gas - sort of a noble liquid."
The combination of a stable d10s2 configuration with the relativistic  
stabilization of the 6s orbital peaks at mercury. 
--

* Dave Blackburn  dblackbu@alleg.edu  flames to self@home.dev.null *          
* Chemistry, Macs, Hypercard, cats,  <>< religion, & the Dead      *
* (Anyone else who held these opinions would be as crazy as I am.) *
*   "Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own"   *