Deliberate Crystal Defects Power Phones

Your phone only works because of a deliberate mistake in a crystal. We think solids

are perfect blocks, but they are actually just billions of atoms stacked like oranges in a grocery

store. It is all about packing efficiency. Sometimes the universe leaves a gap or

shoves an atom where it does not belong, creating what chemists call Frenkel or Schottky defects.

It sounds bad, but without these atomic glitches and doping silicon with impurities,

we would not have the semiconductors that run the internet. We literally hack nature's geometry

to build supercomputers. The solid world is not static, it is just a perfectly calculated mess.