 What I wanna do in this video is discuss what it means to be a metal or metallic nature. So first let's just think about the metals that we encounter in everyday life or based on our experience, the things that we associate with being a metal. So the elements that really jump out at us at metals where we always refer to it, hey, that's a metal or that's metallic are things like iron, iron, or nickel, or copper, or silver, or gold, or aluminum, or at least for me, these are the ones that immediately pop out. So hey, I've seen these things before and they all feel like metals to me. But I'll just think about what's true about these things and as we'll see many other elements on the periodic table that give them this metallic nature. What do we associate with having a metallic nature? Well, one is that these things can be shiny. These things tend to be shiny, that there's kind of a gloss when light shines on it. They're not just kind of a matte color. They look metallic, literally. That's sometimes the word that's used for it. It has a metallic shininess to it. Another thing that we associate with it is they tend to be fairly dense. If I take a metal, a block of a metal, and if I drop it into water, I imagine that sinking, that it's not floating on top of the water. We also imagine them having a very high melting point that they tend to be solid at room temperature. And as we'll see, this is true of all metals, except for one of them, which is mercury, which is shiny, but at room temperature, as you might be familiar, is in its liquid form. Now the other things that I associate with a metal is that I can make things out of them pretty, I can bend them and shape them in different ways. If I think of aluminum foil, I can bend it. It's not just going to crack. I can bend it and put it into different shapes. Even things like iron, it might take a lot of pressure to do it, but they're bendable, they're malleable. And definitely things like gold and silver and copper, you can actually mold into different types of jewelry. If you put pressure on it, it's more likely to bend than crack and just kind of shear off. So let's put malleability, they're malleable. Malleable. And then the other thing that I associate with metals is that they conduct electricity well. Conduct, conduct electricity. A place that you'll see metal in your life is if you open up your electronics, you'll see wires that might be made out of copper or you might have components that are made out of other metals like gold or silver or whatever else. So given that these are some of the properties that we associate with metals, let's think about what's happening at the atomic level to give these elements, these properties. The way I think about it, let's just go with copper for a second. Let's imagine a block of copper at the atomic level. So let's say this is one copper nucleus right over there and it has its C of electrons. It has its C of electrons. Just like, or not in a C of electrons. It has all of its electrons and the various orbitals will talk about C of electrons in a second. But this is kind of its cloud of electrons, I should say. So this is electron clouds. So the electrons are just jumping around in this cloud. It's really a probability density. There's kind of a certain probability that could be at any point in that cloud. And so let's imagine a big solid piece of copper. So you would have a bunch of these. You would have a bunch of these all together, all forming the solid. And what allows metals to be malleable, to do things like conduct electricity, which is the movement of electrons, is essentially that they're very willing to share electrons with each other. By sharing electrons, so you can imagine this is one copper atom, that's another. Let's say they're sharing some electrons. That's what allows electricity, or this flow of electrons, to happen. If these electrons are loosely bound, then if you put a potential difference, a voltage, let's say that you put a potential difference so that this side is more negative and that this side is more positive, then the electrons are going to want to get away from the negative charge, move towards the positive charge, and if they're relatively freely bound, they can kind of move from one cloud to the next. And you kind of end up having what's often called a sea of electrons. Let me write that down. You have a sea of electrons, of electrons, which would make this conductive. And that's why you see so much wire made out of copper. And the sea of electrons is also what makes it malleable. If someone were to put, if someone on this side would have put a lot of pressure this way, and on that side put a lot of pressure that way, things that are rigid would just kind of crack and break, would just break right over there. But because you have the sea of electrons, it allows it to be malleable. This part might just bend down a little bit, that part might bend up, but they're not going to, the metallic bond is not going to break. And so given that this metallic nature really comes from the willingness of these atoms to share electrons with each other, to create the sea of electrons, I encourage you to pause this video and think about which atoms on the periodic table, which elements are more likely to do that, to share electrons with others and with each other.