Crystals: Building patterns with randomness

At this point, I'm fully in any time AlphaPhoenix releases a video. He explains material science beautifully.

In today's video he explains the differences between crystalline and amorphous (2:30), shows crystalline aluminum under an SEM (3:45), shows how 2-d magnetic discs when agitated spontaneously produce order (5:00-10:30 - the real money portion of the video), and uses a computer simulation to extend this into the third dimension (11:45).

This is a wonderful exploration of how crystals grow - whether they're our copper (II) sulfate crystals in class or cooling aluminum crystals or any other crystals.

Wonderful stuff, man.

Are solid objects really solid?

I am coming to love Alpha Phoenix's videos more and more with each video. He explores concepts that are often ridiculously subtle until you think about them a little more deeply, and he uses them to explain the details of the materials around us.

In this video he asks how long it would take for a force - a hammer hit in this case - on one end of a bar of steel to be felt on the opposite end of the bar. It's something that seems obvious at first because a push on one end of a steel bar is 'immediately' felt at the other end of the bar. That's true on the scale of a bar a couple of feet long and with the time scale that you and I notice things, but Alpha Phoenix uses far faster measurements than his eyes and proves that the force isn't felt 'immediately' on the other end.

And then he explains why this happens using magnets and springs representing the particles within a solid and does it brilliantly.

Now I just want him to make more of his videos. At his current pace, he's putting out a video a month or so which leads to high quality videos, but I just want more of them.