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Explore the fascinating microscopic world that governs everyday materials in this 59-minute Christmas Lecture from The Royal Institution. Journey into the realm beneath your fingertips where gravity becomes less important and stickiness and quantum mechanics begin to dominate the behavior of materials found in mobile phones, jet planes, and even chocolate. Discover how the very small affects the very large as you examine the extraordinary crystals in chocolate that are specifically designed to melt only in your mouth, and learn how sperm whales use a unique material called spermaceti to control their body density and buoyancy for deep ocean diving. Investigate whether it's possible to create invisibility cloaks, self-healing phones, and super-strong jet planes simply by controlling the scale of materials, and understand how size fundamentally determines the properties and behavior of both living and non-living matter at the molecular level.
