Why does egg shell stick to itself if even the smallest piece falls in the pan?
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Eggs have skin (membrane) under the surface of the hard outer shell so when the hard part breaks and fractures into pieces, the skin holds them together. If you’re saying that the shell pieces are sticking to eachother and/or the eggs, that’s most likely because some egg whites got on the shell when the egg broke and the stickiness of the whites would stick everything together, egg, shell, membrane, pan, hand, whatever.
**important thing to note:** egg whites arent white until you cook or beat them so to your eyes it will look like some magic force is sticking the shell pieces to eachother and to other things. If this isn’t because of the egg whites, it’s because of, well, the rest of this post unfortunately. It gets complicated from here.
**[Extra info and rambling past here, ELI5 ends here! Warning!]**
Egg, especially egg white, is especially sticky if you’re a small, light, flat surface with a lot of surface area such as the thin, light shell. Egg shell also, despite seeming perfectly smooth, has an [extremely rough and porous surface](http://imgur.com/a/WmFUzV0) when looked at under a microscope, almost like igneous rock but super small.
Edit: another important note! The smoother something is, the less surface area it has. **Prepare for a weird example**. Think about your hand, if you make a fist and punch a wall made out of tape, you probably won’t get stuck. But if you slap the wall of tape your hand will stick. This is surface area. Now imagine your hand is really hairy. Now it’s *definitely* gonna stick. Yeah, I know, it’s a weird example but I couldn’t think of anything else more practical. Think of what you expect an egg shell to look like under a microscope (perfectly smooth like a baby’s bottom) and the picture linked above (spider web of solid material) as the fist and the hairy hand, and the egg whites as the wall made out of tape.
If you want to learn more about this, look into the [adhesive and cohesive properties of water](http://imgur.com/a/QXsA2Tu).
It’s one of the five/six unique properties of water that make it so important for life, and why we always look for water on other planets to test if they could support life
I.e. cohesion & adhesion allow plants and humans to move water through vascular system/veins;
high specific heat allows water to store heat and buffer temperature changes, which along side “lower density as a solid” which causes ice to float allows species of fish and plants to continue to live in lakes and ponds that freeze in the winter;
High heat of vaporization allows plants and animals to hold water in high heat conditions such as deserts, and to hold onto water in the body even at high internal body temperatures (98°F, 37°C) which is necessary in colder climates.
Every liquid that isn’t an oil/fat in nature is most likely at least *water based* so these rules apply to almost every liquid. Sap, sweat, drool, pee, spinal fluid, pus, blood, are all water based.
These are just a few examples of each, but there are a lot of things that make water super special and super interesting. They’re a big part of the reason I got super into chemistry, which is a big factor alongside physics to answer your question 🙂
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