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