Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "Best of The History Guy: Invention" video.

  1. To clarify, plasticity refers to the ability of something to deform permanently. Elastic materials can stretch, but then they return to their previous state. Plastic materials can be molded into a new shape without returning to the original one. So for instance, if a bar bends elastically, then it hasn't failed yet. If it bends plastically, then it has, because it will never go back to its original shape. Despite the name, many "plastics" in use don't deform plastically well at all at room temperature. But they are plastic at higher temperatures. Also, fwiw, proteins are single molecules, not "thousands of molecules." They consist of thousands of atoms. All the atoms are covalently bonded to each other, so they are single molecules. They can however consist of multiple chains which are linked at only a few points, and each chain can consist of dozens of residues (amino acids bonded together), but these are just parts of a bigger molecule. In the extreme, these molecules can contain millions of atoms (or tens of billions in the case of DNA), but they are still single molecules.
    6