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 Why is sodium light and iron is heavy ?

Sodium is an alkali metal and is very soft and can cut through knife as they have weak intermolecular attraction leading weak metallic atom-atom bonding while iron is a transition metal which is very hard and requires great energy to break apart.

Iron is hard, tough and strong compared with sodium because of the strong metallic atom-atom bonding (strong intermolecular attraction).

The strong attractive force between the atoms is only weakened at high temperatures; hence iron has the high melting points and boiling points.

This strong bonding between atoms holding them together in iron gives it high density. For example: iron has a density of 7.9 g/cm3 and sodium has a density of 0.97 g/cm3 (lighter than water hence floats on water)

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Iron has greater intermolecular force between particles than sodium. Particles present in iron have less space between them. So sodium is lighter than iron. 

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Sodium  is light as the particles are very far away from each other while iron hasmolecules very close to each other . So you take a sealed polythene and an iron weight  you will se e iron is heavier.

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