h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I love this series - a perfect mixture of cerebral and witty.

quizzical (a happy )

Thank you.

Could you explain this one to me?

Carbon is an element with the symbol C and each atom of that element has six electrons surrounding the nucleus of protons and neutrons. The current concepts of chemestry explain the bonding of atoms as the atom's attempt to obtain the electron configuration of the Noble Gasses, that is to say that each atom wants to have eight electrons in its outermost electron shell just as a gas like Xenon or Neon has. Since carbon has six electrons and the first elecron subshell contains 2 electrons (why hydrogen, with only on electron, becomes H2 as a gas and why nuclear fusion transfroms H2 into He, the Noble Gas Helium with 2 electrons, the odd-man-out of the period), The second and outermost electron subshell contains four electrons, called the valence electrons. In the comic, Carbon has bonded, that is to say it is sharing an electron, with two H (hydrogen has one valence electron) and C (carbon readily bonds with itself, as well as hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen) and is about to form a bond with another H. The + after the H is an indication that the hydrogen atom has one yaylence electron it needs to "give up", and even though it could be said that hydrogen would want to accept an electron, H+ is the way it is written. The C- means that the Carbon atom alread has bonded three times and needs to bond one more time to fill its electron subshell. Energy is used in creating and destroying bonds.
That's all the technical stuff you need to know, except that in that first panel state, carbon is considered "electro negative" that is to say it has a negative charge, while hydrogen is conversly "electro positive" and has a positive (or negative, because it's hydrogen and it's a b*****d to explain) charge. So when the H+ goes towards the C-, the H is positive and the C is negative. The wording implies that the carbon is upset and does not want to bond with the hydrogen, as a human would reject an unwarrented embrace. As stated above, bonds require energy to break and some bonds are very difficult to break, so once the two atoms are bonded, the carbon is upset that it will be bonded to the hydrogen for a long time. Consider that the carbon in some way resents being attached to another hydrogen, and that the carbon would rather be attached to a less common element, such as lithium. Ooo...lithium!