How can copper have a smell?
First off, the mass of the material is highly irrelevant. What you need to know about a material to know how much of it can become air-borne is the vapor pressure. For example, lead is significantly heavier than copper, but has a relatively high low vapor pressure. Same with mercury. Rather than atomic mass of the material, what really matters in vapor pressure is how strongly one atom is bound to the other. If that bond is weak, as in lead and mercury, the material will evaporate of sublimate more quickly than if it is a strong bond. Things like copper are still sublimating at some level. There is absolutely no quantum phenomena going on there, so forget the quantum fluctuations thing. This is a classical phenomena coming about from collisions driven by thermal energy. The atoms run into each other and occasionally, a copper atom goes airborne. And enough of that happens for the human nose to sense it. By the way, the human sense of smell is one of out strongest senses (in that it can
