 I guess that makes sense that everything that I talk about in these lectures, I get really excited about because I get to pick and choose what matters. I get to decide what is helpful to us. And I just got really excited about neutrons, but I think electrons might be cooler than neutrons. Remember, electrons are negatively charged particles that orbit the nucleus. So the stuff we just dealt with is in the nucleus, now we're orbiting the nucleus. And I'll tell you right now, electrons are tiny. Like so tiny that the number of electrons connected to an atom doesn't contribute significantly to its mass. We don't even count them. They were like, dude, whatever, it's like a fly circling the earth, like whatever. It's not gonna change the mass of the earth that much when the fly lands on the earth, whatever. That electrons are that tiny, but they have some really, really cool applications. Number one, the number of electrons that you have can determine the charge of your atom. And when you compare electrons to protons, positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons, you can actually determine the charge of an atom. I have some activities here that we can practice. We can practice looking at this. So I just drew, like, look at my beautiful, my beautiful drawing of an atom. And I labeled the electrons. I want you to determine the charge of this particle. And you do that by counting electrons and counting protons. In this case, I'm just gonna go through and be like one, two, three, four, five. There's five protons. I don't like that little P plus. That doesn't look like anything to me. Let's count neutrons just for the heck of it. One, two, three, four, five, five neutrons. We might as well, like, have that information on hand. We can decide if that's necessary or not. And now let's count electrons. One, two, three, four, five electrons. With this information, you can tell me the net charge of this atom. In this case, we don't care about the neutrons. They don't impact the charge of the atom. And again, I wanna impress upon you that we don't actually change protons to change the charge. Changing protons changes the element itself. There may be charge consequences when you compare protons to electrons, but the charge is gonna be determined by comparing the electrons to the protons. Now, I hope that I can explain this well enough for you to go, if there are five positive charges and five negative charges, my net charge is going to be zero because the five positives all cancel out the five negatives. If you take one positive charge and one negative charge and you put them together, like join them, then that thing that I joined them in has a net charge of zero. If I took two electrons and one proton, one of the electrons is gonna be connected to the proton to get in charge of zero, but we have one more electron, which has a negative charge. So my charge in that case is gonna be negative one. Do you follow that? Our first picture has a net charge of zero. I have two, well, I have four more for us to do for practice. So if you wanna push pause, go ahead and do that and count your particles. I don't care if you count, well, maybe we should count all of them. We should do protons, neutrons and electrons and see how these compare. In scenario two and scenario three. All right, I'm gonna just do this work for you. The electrons in scenario two, one, two, three, four, five, six, there's six of those guys. Hmm, the plot thickens. We still have five neutrons. However, we have one, two, three, four, five protons. We have that scenario that I was just talking about where we had one extra electron and that means the net charge of this thing is gonna be negative one. You cool with that? Does that make sense? Let's try scenario three just for the fun of it. Protons, we still have the same number of protons. So we have five protons. Looks like we lost a neutron. So now we're at four neutrons and one, two, three, four, five, we kept five electrons. What is the net charge of this? Funny buddy. All we look at are protons and electrons and they're equal. So our net charge is zero. That works, doesn't it? Let's try the next one. Let's see, we gotta do our whole list again. Protons, neutrons, electrons for scenario four and five. All right, protons and scenario four, we have one, two, three, only four. Our protons have changed. Our protons change, which means we have a different element right now that we're dealing with. You could look on the periodic chart and you could tell me what element we were talking about. We have one, two, three, four, five neutrons and we have one, two, three, four electrons. What's our charge? We lost a proton, but we also lost an electron. So our net charge is still zero. Let's look at scenario five. Dude, we lost a bunch of electrons. We're down to three electrons. One, two, three, four protons and one, two, three, four, five neutrons. In this case, we have one more proton than electron. So three of our electrons cancel out. Three of our protons, but we have one more proton remaining. So our net charge is positive one. All of those situations, all of those little scenarios, I even labeled them as scenarios. If they have a charge, this is an ion. If it is a positive charge, it is a cat ion. I'll say right now that my young son is probably not gonna have a problem remembering that cat ions are positively charged ions because he loves cats and that is very positive. So that makes it easy to remember cat ions are positively charged. This scenario four is not an ion. I'm just gonna write that down. Oops, not an ion. Did that blow up for you guys? I think it did. Look, scenario three, net charge of zero, not an ion. Scenario one is an ion and if a positively charged particle is a cat ion, a negatively charged particle is a dog ion. Just kidding, it's not. It's an an ion. I don't know how you're gonna remember that, but I would remember cat ion and then the opposite is an ion. But some of you might remember, I'm not going to confuse it with me trying to give you ideas for what to remember. Okay, electrons make ions now. Oh my gosh, ions. Ions are charged particles, sodium ions, calcium ions, potassium ions. Have you ever heard of drinking sports drinks so that you can replace your ions and your electrolytes? Electrolytes are ions, often. And they impact neural function. So if you wanna get weird, change your ion concentration and weird things happen like muscle cramps, twitching, other things can happen when you, whatever, change your ion concentration in your giddy up. Okay, so ions are really important. Ions are electrons are also really important because they play a role in forming chemical bonds. And they're actually, I think that I don't know where I'm supposed to talk about chemical bonds. Oh, I get to talk about that in its own section. So I get to stop right now and talk about chemical bonds next because electrons are related to chemical bonding. Bye.