ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Victor Goldschmidt

Okay kiddo, I’ll do my best to explain Victor Goldschmidt in a way that will be easy for you to understand.

Victor Goldschmidt was a scientist who was very interested in rocks and minerals. He liked to study how they formed and how they were made up of different chemicals. He lived a long time ago, a hundred years ago, when people didn’t know as much about rocks and minerals as we do now.

One of the things that Victor Goldschmidt is famous for is his idea of “geochemical classification.” This was a way of dividing rocks and minerals into different groups based on their chemical properties, like how much of certain chemicals they had. This helped people understand the different types of rocks and how they were formed.

Another thing that Victor Goldschmidt discovered was that some minerals can change into other minerals over time because of things like heat and pressure. This is called “metamorphism” and it’s something that happens a lot in the Earth’s crust, where rocks are constantly being pushed and squeezed by the movement of tectonic plates.

In addition to his work on rocks and minerals, Victor Goldschmidt was also interested in the origins of the solar system. He believed that the Earth and other planets formed from a cloud of gas and dust that existed billions of years ago.

Thanks for listening, I hope you learned something new about Victor Goldschmidt and his contributions to science!