The AFU and Urban Legend Archive
Science
Glass Flow
 glass science cite




From: David.Bloomberg@f2112.n2430.z1.fidonet.org (David Bloomberg)
Date: 15 Jun 95 06:41:08 -0500

For what it's worth, glass did used to be commonly referred to as a super-cooled liquid. However, as Doremus points out in _Glass Science_ (incidentally a book Copyrighted in 1973), "the difficulty with this view is that glasses can be prepared without cooling from the liquid state. Glass coatings are deposited from the vapor or liquid solution, sometimes with chemical reactions. Thus sodium silicate glass can be made by evaporating an aqueous solution of sodium silicate (water glass) and baking the deposit to remove water. The product of this process is indistinguishable from sodium silicate glass of the same composition made by cooling from the liquid." (p. 1)

Interestingly, while he doesn't speak specifically of the supposedly flowing windows, he does say the following, also on p. 1:

"Glass is an amorphous solid. A material is amorphous when it has no long-range order, that is, when there is no regularity in the arrangement of its molecular constituents on a scale larger than a few times the size of these

groups. ... A solid is a rigid material; IT DOES NOT FLOW WHEN IT IS SUBJECTED TO MODERATE FORCES. More quantitatively, a solid can be defined as a material with a viscosity of more than about 10^15 P (poises)." [Emphasis mine]


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