What are materials like plastic, metal, and glass made of?
Atom Hand-Holding
What are materials like plastic, metal, and glass made of?
Look around you. The phone in your hand, the window across the room, the spoon in your drawer — they all feel completely different. But here's a secret they share: every single one is built from the same tiny LEGO bricks. We call those bricks atoms. The whole trick of plastic, metal, and glass is just which atoms, and how they hold hands.
An atom is unimaginably small — millions could hide in the dot of this letter i. Each kind of atom has its own personality. Some love to grab onto neighbors, some prefer to slide around, some snap together into stiff patterns. The personality of the atoms decides whether you get something bendy, something shiny, or something see-through.
