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Stimshieme
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09 Jan 2008, 3:38 pm

Is glass a liquid? how?



Last edited by Stimshieme on 09 Jan 2008, 4:17 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Zarathustra
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09 Jan 2008, 4:14 pm

Yes.


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Phagocyte
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09 Jan 2008, 4:18 pm

No, though at one point it was.



Mindtear
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09 Jan 2008, 4:37 pm

Yes, a very viscous one. The glass in the windows of old churches is thicker at the bottom then at the top because it has slowly run down the pane.



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09 Jan 2008, 4:49 pm

Well, it depends on your exact definition of 'liquid' (there are things, like half-molten Jello, silly putty or cake mix, that aren't unambiguously one or the other). If you use the rheological definition (it measurably flows under any shear you can measure) then for practical purposes it is a solid (if you could carry out the experiment for a very, very long time, it would flow and be a viscoelastic fluid, at even longer time scales it would just be a supercooled liquid).
If you use a molecular definition, then glass is a type of liquid (dense state with short range order but no long-range order - in the case of glass, it would eventually form an ordered state, but in practice this takes too long).
Incidentally, in materials science the word 'glass' is often used to refer to dense non-equilibrium state with no long-range order but short-range order (of which window glass would be an example, but not the only one).
Many substances have complicated phase behaviour, like multiple solid states, or are viscoelastic, have yield stresses (toothpaste, mayonnaise) or have no clear-cut boiling transition between liquid and gas, so that rheologists and materials scientists often don't use labels like 'liquid' or 'solid' much but use more elaborate ways of characterising a substance's mechanical properties (flow curves, loss and storage moduli, etc).


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09 Jan 2008, 5:40 pm

Man; hard to top that last answer. I doff my chapeau. :D

But . . . I remember a citation from one of my very favorite sources, Unca Cecil from the Straight Dope. He replies:

Quote:
There's no sharp line dividing liquids and solids. A supercooled liquid, the term applied to glass for many years, has been rapidly chilled past its normal freezing point and become apparently solid without assuming the regular crystalline structure typical of solids. The term du jour, amorphous solid, means an apparently solid substance that lacks crystalline structure and instead has the random organization of liquids. In other words, we used to think of glass as a solidlike liquid, and now we think of it as a liquidlike solid. Big frickin' deal.

I concede that changes in the properties of glass once it cools past the "glass transition temperature" are an argument for calling it a solid. But to my mind the real question is whether glass flows, as liquids do. I'm happy to say it does, just not very fast. In the original column I wrote, "At room temperature [glass's] rate of flow is so slow that it would take billions of years to ooze out of shape." In the October 1999 issue of Discover, Yvonne Stokes, a mathematician at the University of Adelaide in Australia, says that it would take a mere ten million years for a windowpane to get 5 percent thicker at the bottom. So the way I see it, not only was I essentially right, I was being conservative by a margin of 100 to 1.



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09 Jan 2008, 5:45 pm

Mindtear wrote:
Yes, a very viscous one. The glass in the windows of old churches is thicker at the bottom then at the top because it has slowly run down the pane.

Apparently that's a misconception.

Quote:
[...W]hy are the panes of antique window glass thicker on the bottom than the top? There really are observable variations in thickness, although there seem to have been no statistical studies that document the frequency and magnitudes of such variations. This author believes that the correct explanation lies in the process by which window panes were manufactured at that time: the Crown glass process.

In other words, while some antique windowpanes are thicker at the bottom, there are no statistical studies to show that all or most antique windowpanes are thicker at the bottom than at the top. The variations in thickness of antique windowpanes has nothing to do with whether glass is a solid or a liquid; its cause lies in the glass manufacturing process employed at the time, which made the production of glass panes of constant thickness quite difficult.


http://dwb.unl.edu/Teacher/NSF/C01/C01L ... lorin.html



Mindtear
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09 Jan 2008, 7:56 pm

Why arn't there panes where they are thicker at other sides, such as the top or corners? Although they used to stretch out the glass rather than squeeze it, it still wouldn't explain the inches in thickness difference from bottom to top of the pane.
Im sure ive read somewhere they add thickeners or crystalising agents to slow this "morphing" down. Im sorry i cant be bothered to cite it :roll:



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09 Jan 2008, 7:57 pm

I was surprised when I learned this...I think it was my chemistry teacher who told our class this year.



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10 Jan 2008, 1:50 am

Mindtear wrote:
Why arn't there panes where they are thicker at other sides, such as the top or corners? Although they used to stretch out the glass rather than squeeze it, it still wouldn't explain the inches in thickness difference from bottom to top of the pane.

This, from here: http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/gmis9844.htm

Quote:
When the glaziers would install it in a window, they would normally do it like you build a building - with the bigger bits at the bottom and the thinner bits at the top. But, Stephen Hawkes from Oregon, who has dedicated his life to dismantling and repairing medieval glass windows, says that while most of the glass that he has seen was bottom-heavy, he has seen hundreds of pieces of old plate glass that were thicker at the top.


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10 Jan 2008, 8:35 am

Glass has a melting point that is very low, that means it can be cold enough to freeze water and yet the glass will still not be solid. It is a liquid in my mind and as I understand one reason why it does not shatter whenever it vibrates to a point, if it was a real solid it would shatter everytime it vibrated, thats so much that their would be no intact glass on Earth. I read this in a science book in 8th grade, I cant remember exactly the reason why.


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10 Jan 2008, 1:55 pm

I think the fact that glass is used to hold acids, and that it safely does so, is powerful evidence for it being a liquid.
Acid will not eat through glass. Why else could that be?


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10 Jan 2008, 2:05 pm

Ragtime wrote:
I think the fact that glass is used to hold acids, and that it safely does so, is powerful evidence for it being a liquid.
Acid will not eat through glass. Why else could that be?


Not all acids - HF will eat through glass (teflon is used to store it), though HF is a bit extreme. Solids can also store acids - gold will withstand most acids (though a misture of nitric and hydrochloric acid will dissolve it).


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10 Jan 2008, 2:22 pm

pbcoll wrote:
Ragtime wrote:
I think the fact that glass is used to hold acids, and that it safely does so, is powerful evidence for it being a liquid.
Acid will not eat through glass. Why else could that be?


Not all acids - HF will eat through glass (teflon is used to store it), though HF is a bit extreme. Solids can also store acids - gold will withstand most acids (though a misture of nitric and hydrochloric acid will dissolve it).


I admit I'm partly ignorant of the chemistry that goes on with acids eating away materials.
Could you educate me as to what makes a material "acid soluable"? And why do glass and gold do such a good job at containing acids? Gold is, interestingly, also terrific at conducting electricity, which I find interesting. Are gold's acid continence and electric conductivity related to each other?


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10 Jan 2008, 2:32 pm

This is one of the most common myths that is taught. Just goes to show you should never just take what somebody says as gospel truth.

Liquid is also different from fluid. Nobody said it was a liquid. Not even gels are considered liquids.



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10 Jan 2008, 2:38 pm

woodsman25 wrote:
I understand one reason why it does not shatter whenever it vibrates to a point, if it was a real solid it would shatter everytime it vibrated, thats so much that their would be no intact glass on Earth. I read this in a science book in 8th grade, I cant remember exactly the reason why.


Normal glass is not ordered or uniform all the way through but the glass will shatter if you have a high enough frequency.