ABSTRACT
Covalent bonds are quite strong, as chemical bonds go, requiring anywhere from about 3 to 8 eV for breakage, depending on the atoms involved. The elements that are most common in living systems are also common in nonliving systems; these elements are hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. The two unpaired spins of atomic carbon are in two 2p electron clouds, from which we could ostensibly get spin pairing to yield the molecule CH2. It is hypothesized that when carbon covalently bonds, its electron clouds change from free atomic forms to so-called hybrid forms, whose existence only makes sense in terms of molecular chemical bonds. Possession of only a single kind of rotation is characteristic of a sphere because the rotation of a sphere is the same about every axis; thus, the hybridization of methane must approximate a sphere. The C-H covalent bonds have circular cross sections perpendicular to the intemuclear axis; they are a bonds because they have axial symmetry.
