What can springs can teach us about solids?
Published in
6 min readJun 15, 2020
You might think of solids as fixed objects with atoms fixed in place. However, atoms in solids keep bouncing off each other in the same way as in a gas. The main difference is that in a solid, atoms don’t move relative to their neighbors. They maintain a fixed pattern like the hexagonal structure (each atom has 6 neighbors) in the animation and this is essential for the key properties that distinguish solids from…
