Materials exhibit an extremely wide range of properties, which is what makes them so useful and indispensable to humankind. The extremely wide range of the properties of materials is surprising, because most of them are made up from a relatively small subset of the elements in the Periodic Table: about 20 or 30 elements, out of more than 100 total, are encountered in most common materials. Moreover, most materials contain only very few of these elements, from one to half a dozen or so. Despite this relative simplicity in composition, materials exhibit a huge variety of properties over ranges that differ by many orders of magnitude. It is quite extraordinary that even among materials composed of single elements, physical properties can differ by many orders of magnitude.
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