It varies wildly molecule to molecule, but like... OP.... this is something people already do and have done for decades and decades at this point...?

Electrolysis is a name of a process that does this. I'm not sure if it's the only one. I know there's photochemistry aswell.

Breaking molecular bonds always takes energy. So you'll need some sort of input. (Light, electricity, heat)

You need extreme amounts of energy to break apart most chemical bonds.

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Am I wrong but aren't there countless forms of this already naturally occurring? i.e. evaporation, distillation, sublimation, etc?

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None of those are examples. Those are all just state changes and not chemical changes.

Edit: spelling

Breaking and making chemical bonds is something we do every day in all sorts of contexts. However, they're all very specific. If we want to turn X into Y, a lot of work goes into developing a process that is energy efficient, material efficient, etc.

We don't have any ability to drop a chicken bone into a slot and get back a neat pile of carbon, neat pile of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and so on. Nor do we have the ability to start with those piles and make a chicken bone. This is just science fiction for now.

It would likely be fantastically energy intensive.

Breaking molecular bonds always requires initial starting energy but once started all exergonic reactions actually release energy as bonds are broken.

It's literally, like, half of how youre alive? In a living thing it's called catabolism. It's the opposite of anabolism. Together they form metabolism

The hardest class for most people to get a biology degree is organic chemistry. It is mostly just memorizing reactions and being able to put them together and get from starting point x to ending point y.

Most everybody at some point learns

c6h12o6+602----->6co2+6h2o+energy

There are boundless reams of studies on just that one concept

This is not remotely true. Lots of chemical bonds are extremely easy to break.

Can you elaborate?

This is a troll post. No need to take this seriously.

I mean, in general anything that affects molecular bonds is a type of chemical change. There are lots and lots of ways to do this. You’re doing it in your cells right now.

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There aren’t any universal ways of doing this, but it always requires some energy and usually only works for compounds composed of two elements. Some somewhat unstable compounds decompose into their constituent elements if you heat them. For example, silver oxide decomposes into silver metal and oxygen gas at high temperatures. Some unstable compounds may do this violently such as metal azides which decompose into a metal and nitrogen gas. But for most compounds, you can’t really do this. Some compounds can also be decomposed into their constituent elements if you apply an electric current through them with enough voltage in a solution/liquid phase (i.e. electrolysis). This is how sodium metal is produced in industry (I believe this process is called the Down’s Process). In conclusion, it depends on the compound and usually doesn’t work for most of them.

i think he meant state changes in which the atoms or molecules don't change but their energy and speed change

There are several different processes that do this. Combustion, electrolysis, many chemical interactions, or just plain heat.

Combustion releases energy and is used in internal combustion engines, and other chemically powered heat engines, such as boilers, steam powered generators (yes redundant.)

Electrolysis is used to break down chemical bonds and is often used to purify materials or separate elements. You could produce hydrogen and oxygen from water as an example.

Adding an acid or base will change many materials. You can "cook" proteins using acids such as lemon juice or vinegar.

Finally just heating something up will break many chemical bonds. Think cooking or as another extreme, purifying metals in a furnace.

All of this has been know for decades or centuries, and is common knowledge. I recommend a basic chemistry course for more in depth explanations and details.

We need to invent the shrink ray first so we can shrink all the personell and equipment necessary to do that.

I mean we have the technology to break molecules, sure, but think about how much more efficient it would be if we could shrink down TNT or even a nuclear warhead an really blast the shit out of those molecules.

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It happens all the time in a million ways. Like let's take something easy that happens fairyl often in elementary school classes as our first reaction: Baking soda is added to acetic acid (vinegar)

NaHCO3 + HC2H3O2 → NaC2H3O2 + H2O + CO2

Molecular bonds were broken. Nothing impressive. If you want to break it further, you can get electricity to go through that water and it will break the water molecules through electrolysis into Oxygen (O2) and Hydrogen.

If you don' feel like breaking the last mollecular bonds yourself you could release the CO2 in the atmosphere. Plants will probably get some of that CO2 transformed into O2 and sugars through photosynthesis.

At the higher layers of the atmosphere, O2 gets broken down all the time into single Oxygen atoms by UV rays and then recombine with nearby O2 to form O3 (Ozone).

Pretty much any chemical reaction you can think of is just that: breaking apart molecules.

Wrong sub, maybe post this into AskScience or AskChemistry if you want an actual answer.

Like like dissolving most salts in water.

Sure. The things you listed are all state changes - changes between the states of matter - solid, liquid, gas, and (not mentioned in your post) plasma.

Evaporation is liquid to gas. Sublimations is straight from solid to gas (think “what dry ice does”). State changes are driven by a combination of the amount of energy in a substance and pressure. However, when things change states their molecular structures don’t change. Water vapor, liquid water, and solid water (ice) are all the same chemical substance (H2O) just in different states.

For a chemical change, molecules must change. This means that atoms must break and/or create bonds with one another. This happens generally by sharing or exchanging electrons in the outermost shell (called the valence shell) of the atoms. So there will be DIFFERENT molecules after a chemical change then there were at the beginning. Examples of this include burning paper (in which cellulose breaks down to glucose and glucose breaks down to CO2 and H2O) or photosynthesis (which is sort of the reverse chemical reaction) in which plants use CO2 and H2O to make glucose (C6H12O6).

I did. Thanks.

I think this is a child who hasn’t made it to chemistry yet.

The real challenge is splitting the atom to add bubbles to beer.

Well, for certain values of extreme I guess? Mix a base and an acid, boom broken bonds (and new bonds formed). But I wouldn't call adding vinegar and bicarbonate together "extreme".

Plus, all our cells get their energy chemically by the ATP (adenosine triphosphate) getting turned back into ADP (Adenosine di-phosphate) + phosphate. Breaking chemical bonds is super common.

Oxygen molecules break down to nascent oxygen atoms in the ozone layer & then form an equilibrium with the ozone molecule. I guess exposing oxygen to the right frequency radiation can break it down into its constituent oxygen atoms.

PS: exposing any type of molecule to the right frequency of radiation can break it down into constituent atoms. But even then you cannot eliminate the weak forces (like vander waal forces or London forces) so the constituent atoms will still try to group together to form some other type of molecule & will be in equilibrium with that molecule.

Oh. I missed distillation in your post. Sorry. In distillation we use the fact that different substances change states at different temperatures in order to separate them (example, separating water from alcohol or the various types of compounds that make up oil (petroleum) into constituent parts like kerosene, diesel, or gasoline. However, generally the substances themselves don’t change chemically.

Evaporation is changing something from a liquid to a gas. Liquid water into water vapor is still water (H2O)

Distillation is removing impurities by heating and cooling. Think of distilling tap water and having salt buildup left behind. Or distilling whiskey to get rid of impurities. It's still whiskey/water at the end, just less junk in it.

Sublimation is going from a solid to a gas, like dry ice (CO2) into regular CO2 gas. All the same stuff, just in a different state.

What you were talking about would be more like electrolysis of water. With stainless steel, tap water and a battery, you can put two pieces of stainless steel (or gold, silver, or platinum, but stainless is easier to find. I used hose clamps when I did this) in water and connect a battery across them. The energy of the batter actually splits the water molecule (H2O) into hydrogen (2H) and oxygen (O) which is actually splitting the molecule into its atoms.

You can tell it split and not just water vapor because you can put a lighter to the bubbles coming from the - side and they should make a small "pop" noise, which is the hydrogen burning with the oxygen into the air and making water vapor. If you collect a bunch of the bubbles from the + side, you can re-light a blown out match/candle that's still hot because it's pure oxygen.

It's weird that water can be broken down into two very volatile fire parts when water is used to put out fire, but that's chemistry for you.

So yeah, long story short, splitting (some) molecules is fairly easy to do and makes some drastically different properties than the original thing!