Are there any elements that, in their pure states, will not bond in any way? But could you tell the difference between not bonding and being a gas?
Oh, on a point of clarification, I would like to point out that I meant “…pure state will not bond with themselves (ie, other atoms of the same element) in any way”
Only Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Flourine, Chlorine, Bromine, and Iodine will form compounds composed of only two atoms of themselves. Those are the diatomic elements.
I don’t know of any elements that will not bond with themselves in any way, unless you mean the Noble Gases (Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, and Radon). The Noble Gases won’t bond with anything (under conditions you are likely to see).
But as for atoms that will bond with anything except themselves, well, I don’t know.
The heavier Noble gases will bond with strong oxidizers such as F.
But form really unstable compounds, right?
The recesses of my brain - you know, the parts that were paying attention in chemistry - tell me that Helium is the only element that has not been forced into a bond, besides the really heavy elements that have only been created in a lab for a few picoseconds. That doesn’t sound right, though, so take it for what it’s worth.
http://www.webelements.com lists “noble gas” compounds only of xenon (many mentioned) and krypton (a diflouride), and specifically says “Argon is very inert and is not known to form true chemical compounds.”. Presumably, neon and helium should be even harder to coerce into forming compounds. It doesn’t list any for radon, either, which I imagine is more because nobody wants to bother with the difficulties of working with it to produce, say, radon <something>-flouride, because of the radiation hazard.
An encycopedia article on argon mentions that “xenon, krypton and radon” form compounds, which agrees with the link provided by grimpixie.
As noted by that article, some of the xenon compounds may be practical for commercial applications.
I do know that uranium-xenon compounds are used in the processing of uranium ore.
An interesting side note to this is that solid sulfur’s most common form is S[sub]8[/sub], which forms a ring kinda like benzene without the double bonds and hydrogens and there are 8 atoms instead of 6 (ok not like benzene at all, but you know what I mean).
further to the xenon question,
you can buy xenon difluoride as a nice white solid from any good chemical supplier, though it is very expensive (about $100 per gram)
looking at the original question again, there is one point unanswered.
“But could you tell the difference between not bonding and being a gas?”
Things are gases because there is no or little bonding between particles. If there was bonding, then it would by necessity be a liquid or solid. To tell if a gas like oxygen is just one atom per particle, or two or more (hence some bonding within a molecule) , one can use many methods. One of the most direct is a mass spectrometer, which sort of weighs the molecule. Hence it is found that oxygen is normally O2, but can exist as O3 sometimes (ozone) and even just O but then it is very very reactive. In principle one could make a very very dilute gas out of just O, but it would not be stable over time, turning back to O2 eventually.