Eli5: Why does Bismuth grow in square shapes?
In: Chemistry
The answer to this is the same answer to why anything grows in any shape. The atoms connecting to their nebourgh atoms will start to form a continus pattern in 3 dimensions. As more atoms join the soild (say its cooling from a liquid) they will bond with whichever atom they touch, but because there is only one (of mabye a few but lets say 1) way it can connect into place it will connect in that way. As more and more atoms keep joining in the same way it keeps that shape even at a large scale.
Slightly more advanced way to consider it is that there would be a few ways specfic atoms could bond with eachother in this “crystal lattice”, but the one that forms this shape is the “lowest energy position”, so on average more atoms will join this way. any impurities will cause defects in the lattice, which can drastically alter the overall shape. Imagine connecting all lego bricks of the same size, filling in all the gaps. Now imagine for ever 20 bricks you have 1 megablock, no matter how you build it its going to have irregularities as that one wrongly sized brick changes how you have to build the shape to have the fewest gaps within the structure.
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