1.   At room temperatures, copper atoms continually jiggle around, bouncing the tin atoms along the surface until they coalesced into larger clumps.

2.   Because tin atoms are larger than copper atoms, they cause a bulge when they enter the surface.

3.   In the experiments, hundreds of thousands of tin atoms were dropped, one by one, onto a copper surface.

4.   The energy put into shaping the alloy is stored in the crystal structure as stresses between adjacent nickel and tin atoms.