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posted by on Tuesday November 29 2016, @06:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the for-a-perfect-beer-mug dept.

Princeton University researchers have developed a computational model for creating a "perfect glass" that never crystallizes—even at absolute zero. Published in Nature Scientific Reports, the model is a new way of thinking about glass and details the extremely unusual properties of a perfect glass.

"We know that if you make anything cold enough it will crystallize, but this is an extremely exotic situation where you're completely avoiding that," said corresponding author Salvatore Torquato, a Princeton professor of chemistry and the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials.

Scientists researching glass have been puzzled by its nature for more than a century. The unruly configuration of its molecules suggests that it should flow like a liquid yet it is as rigid and unyielding as a solid. The glass transition, or the temperature when cooled liquids transform into a glass, is another mystery. Whereas the transition from a liquid to a solid is extremely sharp, at 0 degrees Celsius in water for example, glasses can form over a range of temperatures and only if the liquids were cooled rapidly enough to avoid crystallization.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @07:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @07:54PM (#434646)

    Century old glass windows are thicker at the bottom because the glass is still viscous enough to slowly flow due to gravity.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Taibhsear on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:07PM

    by Taibhsear (1464) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:07PM (#434653)
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:41PM

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:41PM (#434677) Journal

      I remember watching a program on PBS a while back in which a physicist (or chemist) stated that in order for that statement to be true, the glass would have to have been there before the universe existed.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday November 29 2016, @09:52PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 29 2016, @09:52PM (#434697)

        Pretty much the same argument which is a good challenge for high school physics students is optical "stuff" works best when correct to a tenth of a wavelength of light and its actually pretty easy to test and manipulate. Which is a zillion decimal places smaller than the window stories. So since glass is glass, a telescope could only operate for a couple seconds (or whatever) before getting too mushy and no longer a perfect mirror or perfect lens.

        Another fun argument is if it'll mush under its own weight, which isn't much, the enormously higher forces of a thunderstorm should bulge the glass out quite a bit. Which I'm told sometimes happens to some stained glass windows.

        • (Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday November 30 2016, @10:49AM

          by shrewdsheep (5215) on Wednesday November 30 2016, @10:49AM (#434853)

          OTOH, the question is what is meant by "much" or "mush". I expect that given time (centuries in the case of church windows) there should be some effect, let us say on the order of nanometers. For if the effect would be truly zero, glass would have to be a crystal (well, sort of).

          • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:49PM

            by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:49PM (#434896)

            let us say on the order of nanometers

            Simultaneously it can't be much more, or ancient eyeglasses and telescopes and worlds first microscopes and stuff from that era wouldn't work anymore. So you do have an absolute upper bound of the effect of it must be less than maybe ten nanometers per century. It could of course be a trillion times less but observationally it can't be more.

            Another thing to think about is the bottom of my decade old fish tank should no longer be flat because the forces are pretty high compared to merely standing a piece of glass on edge someplace.

  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:30PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:30PM (#434669) Homepage

    No.

    They just didn't have such a good glass manufacturing process in those days, so they always put the glass in heavy side first.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:47PM (#434680)

      That's not true either. About as many window panes were put in thick-portion-up as they were down.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 30 2016, @12:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 30 2016, @12:06AM (#434739)
    Not true [cmog.org]. If it were true, then ancient glass artefacts should have deformed into shapeless masses. The eyes of Tutankhamun’s mask are made of coloured glass, and if it were true that glass were not entirely solid, the eyes should have deformed substantially in the three thousand years since it was made. Ancient Greek and Roman glass vessels should have sagged and become misshapen in the past two thousand years.