ABSTRACT
The question of how to fill space, without leaving any gaps, by fitting together identically shaped building blocks is one of the most ancient of all problems about space. Aristotle, who was one of Plato's more notable students, argued correctly that his tutor's idea could not be fully compatible with reality since most of these fundamental solid shapes could not be packed together to fill space without leaving gaps. Glasses being those solids that seem to have trouble in finding a way to pack space without becoming scrambled and distorting their atomic 'building blocks'. The best glass formers consist of a random packing of molecular rather than atomic units. Much more stable glassy metals can be prepared by alloying (that is mixing) with small amounts of other non-metallic elements like phosphorus, carbon or silicon. No two glasses are ever identical in structure on the atomic scale.
