Why is carbon the "craziest" element in the periodic table?
When it comes to the most special elements in the periodic table, everyone has their own opinion through different angles, such as very reactive, or deadly, or even rare. In my opinion, I personally think carbon is the craziest element. Take diamonds, for example. Diamonds are revered for their brilliance, purity, and rarity, especially large diamonds like the one below.
However, diamonds are rarely recognized as the hardest of all known substances. That's why they're embedded in the TBM's drill bits. The only way to scratch one diamond is with another diamond or laser, but diamonds can also scratch other hard substances, such as sapphires, rubies, and emeralds.
Even more surprising than the hardness of a diamond is that it is one of the only molecules you might or will see with the naked eye. Yes, diamonds are molecules.
The repeat structure of the diamond is adamantane, as shown in the figure above. Amantane itself is a highly stable molecule, but when they combine, they form very stable and hard diamond molecules.
Carbon's madness is partly due to its keys.
Under standard conditions, it can form up to four bonds, which you might think limits its madness, but because carbon forms very stable bonds with other carbons, each additional carbon leads to a huge increase in diversity. In fact, there are actually more than a billion carbon-based molecules. Note the diversity of the compounds of the two carbon bonds, as well as the diversity of shapes.
In contrast to steroid precursor cholesterol, which has a lot of carbon, changes biologically in small amounts in different ways, resulting in thousands of hormones and steroids, and estrogen and testosterone are two examples.
What makes carbon even more crazy is that it easily deals with most other elements on the periodic table. For example, it binds to chlorine, oxygen, and nitrogen, but also to iron, lead, zinc, and even palladium, platinum, and gold to form organometallic compounds.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg, but there are still many mysteries that have not yet been lifted. Diamonds are hard and beautiful, but seeing the diversity of carbon in our daily lives because of the chemistry of carbon and the diversity of bonding types will clarify why I think carbon is the craziest element.
Nanotechnology
The image above is a club model of graphene, another allotrope of carbon, and it is the flat structure of graphene that allows the pencil to glide effortlessly on the paper. As the pencil moves, thin layers of graphite flakes are left behind.
It's certainly interesting, but what's even more interesting is that we can shape carbon into a ball. This is known as Buckminster fullerene, also known as "Buck ball".
It is named after the architect Buckminster, who designed a building that many people are familiar with, although its external lattice structure is not exactly the same as fullerene, which is the Epicat Center.
We can imagine with another kind of imagination if we take a graphite plate, roll it up, and stitch the two ends together. This end product is called carbon nanotubes.
When you coat a surface with a layer of nanotubes, a material called Vantablack can be made, which can absorb almost all the light that falls on it and create a silhouette of the material form, or even a three-dimensional shadow if you will.
Although they may not be considered "nanotechnology," plastics are made of carbon compounds. Polymerization refers to the connection of molecules containing carbon into long chains, called polymers. For example, ethylene is polymerized by a catalyst into the plastic we use every day. The GIF below summarizes this process, but sulfuric acid is rarely used.
Demonstrating the versatility of carbon is that it can enable a compound to act as a catalyst, where carbon binds to biochemical elements such as oxygen, sulfur, phosphorus, or nitrogen, but instead binds to titanium atoms to form organometallic compounds. Ethylene is then combined with titanium to multiply ethylene by bonding. (Note the titanium-carbon bond (Ti-C), or (Ti-ch2-).) )
Carbon in nature
All life is carbon-based, and even if you live under a rock, you're carbon-based! Carbon-carbon bonds are the basic structures of life (even invertebrates) and are found in sugars, starches, amino acids, and therefore proteins and enzymes. It is also the basic structure of the "code of life", RNA, DNA and its nucleic acids.
Another crazy characteristic of carbon appears in life forms, which are called chirality, although examples of other elements found in chiral compounds are the most prevalent in living systems. What makes the previous example pale is not the inherent possibility of chirality, but the almost unanimous choice of a particular form in living systems!
chirality
When carbon binds to four different atoms or groups, it no longer has a mirror symmetry surface. Molecules without mirror symmetry surfaces are called chiral molecules. This means that they have a different molecule, which is a mirror image of it. Just as your left hand is your right hand, mirror image is your right hand.
While your left and right hands have the same cell type and the same number of fingers, you can't completely overlap them, which exposes that they are actually different. This is why chiral compounds are described as compounds with non-overlapping images.
While the statistical probability of each "hand" seems to be 50/50, on Earth, biological systems overwhelmingly choose one hand. For example, nature mainly produces D-sugars, L-amino acids, and D-nucleic acids.
Thus, the DNA helix turns in only one direction, both of which should be possible when there is statistically no external interference:
This also affects the body's proteins and enzymes, which react many orders of magnitude higher with d-sugar or l-amino acids than d-sugar or l-amino acids, almost 100% excluding the other "hand."
An enzyme's reaction site is essentially a receptor, like the olfactory receptor in our nose. Revealing the chirality of our body system, and its choice of specific left- or right-handed molecules, is an example of carvacrol, which can be separated from two pure forms of each hand. Each caraway has a unique smell, one is spearmint and the other is black licorice. The hands of the limonene molecule also produce a less pronounced difference between lemon and orange odors.
conclusion
Honestly, I'm just scratching the surface of carbon madness, but this answer should provide a good argument for my argument. Carbon is not only the backbone of all life, but also the backbone of modern and future technologies. It was added to iron to form stronger steel, it was mixed with silicon forming silicon carbide for brake pads (only four positions from the hardness of diamonds), asphalt was used for paving roads, it was found in concrete and plastic, used in purification systems, used as a control rod for nuclear reactors, and still supplied most of the energy we used in the world of power and grain.
The extent to which life depends on carbon, both externally and internally, is a madness.