what makes metal hard?
In: 1
As others have pointed out there are soft metals.
Iron can be relatively soft if it’s very pure. It deforms very easily when compared to a ceramic, which is really hard and will shatter instead of bend.
The reason for this is that the atoms in iron are able to slide past each other (more or less). And this is because they’re all the same type of atom in a sea of electrons.
Impurities can be purposefully be added to make iron harder. These impurity atoms get in the way of the “sliding”. Steel is harder, but in turn it is more brittle.
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