Category: Biology

I got carried away with the topic of glass and learned so many interesting things, so I’m sharing. It all started when I read about the supercritical state of matter – it turns out that the line separating liquid and gaseous states on a pressure and temperature graph at some point breaks off, and beyond that lies a state of matter that is neither here nor there. I started reading about states (phases) of matter and stumbled upon the fact that glass is essentially a state between liquid and solid. It flows, just very slowly. This myth is popular thanks to observations of medieval windows, where the glass is often thicker at the bottom, which was attributed to “flowing” under the influence of gravity, and it was even mentioned in school textbooks. In reality, glass is an amorphous solid with extremely high viscosity at room temperature, and it does not flow noticeably even over billions of years; the uneven thickness of old glass panes is explained by production technologies, when the thicker edge was installed at the bottom for stability.

I delved into the topic of glass further. It turned out that the reason why glass can be transparent is rooted in quantum mechanics, specifically in the electronic structure of the material, not because of the density of particles. The essence is that for an electron to absorb a photon, it must transition from one energy level to another, but in silicon dioxide, the width of the band gap is so large that the energy of visible light photons is physically insufficient to make this “jump.” As a result, light simply cannot interact with the electrons and goes straight through the material, while higher-energy ultraviolet radiation can overcome this barrier and is thus absorbed by glass.

It also turned out that melted glass conducts electricity. Moreover, the mechanism of conductivity fundamentally differs from how metals conduct electricity. In a copper wire, current is a flow of free electrons. In cold glass (an insulator), electrons are tightly bound, and ions are locked in the solid lattice. But when you heat glass to the molten state (usually above 1000 degrees for silicates), thermal energy breaks the rigid bonds of the lattice, and glass becomes a liquid, with ions gaining freedom of movement. The current in molten glass is the physical movement of charged atoms (ionic conductivity), not just “flowing” electrons.

The green tint you see on the edge of regular glass (as seen in the attached picture) turns out to be caused by iron ions, present as impurities (~0.1%). Sand is a natural material, and removing all the iron from it is difficult and costly. Low-iron glass, which has tens of times fewer iron ions, is used in solar panels, not just because it is more transparent. Iron greedily absorbs the infrared spectrum (thermal energy), reducing the efficiency of the panel. By removing iron, we allow maximum energy to reach the silicon cells.

And finally, the most “mind-blowing” (literally). There are these things called “Prince Rupert’s drops.” If you drop molten glass into icy water, the outer shell of the drop cools and hardens instantly, while the inner part remains liquid. As it cools, the core tries to contract, but the hardened shell doesn’t allow it. As a result, the inside of the drop preserves colossal mechanical stress (up to 700 MPa).

The physics of this process creates a paradox: the “head” of such a drop can withstand being struck by a hammer because the compression of the surface makes it incredibly strong (the same principle is used in tempered glass for smartphones). But just nick the thin tail, and the balance of forces is disrupted, and a wave of destruction moves through the drop at the speed of a bullet (about 1.5 km/s), turning it into glass dust right in your hands.

There’s also something in physics called “metallic glasses” (amorphous metals). If you cool the molten metal at a rate of a million degrees per second, atoms do not have time to arrange into a crystalline lattice and freeze in chaos. Such “glassy metal” possesses unique magnetic permeability and is stronger than titanium, because it lacks crystal lattice defects, which are usually the points of destruction. So glass is a much broader concept than just transparent substance in our windows 🙂

The only example of an object made from this material, amorphous metal, that I’ve encountered is, believe it or not, the iPhone clip.

By the way, that same amorphous structure of glass, which I mentioned earlier, gives it an unexpected advantage — supernatural sharpness. If you take a scalpel made of the best surgical steel and look at it under an electron microscope, its edge will look like a jagged saw. This is inevitable: steel is made up of crystalline grains, and it’s impossible to sharpen it any smoother than the grain size allows.

But obsidian (volcanic glass) when fractured provides an edge only about 3 nanometers thick (about 1/30000 the thickness of a human hair). There’s no magic here, just that glass lacks a crystalline lattice, which would otherwise prevent achieving a perfectly smooth fracture down to the molecular level. That’s why obsidian scalpels are still used in the most complex eye surgeries — the cut is so clean that tissue cells are minimally traumatized, and healing occurs faster.

And one more powerful engineering case — vitrification (glassification). Mankind has chosen glass as the most reliable “safe” for nuclear waste. Liquid radioactive waste is mixed with special additives, melted, and cooled into blocks. The trick is that dangerous isotopes are not just poured inside, they are chemically embedded into the atomic grid of the glass. Glass is chemically inert, it doesn’t rust like metal or decompose for thousands of years. This is perhaps the only material that engineers trust to store hazardous substances on a geological time scale. Yes, it takes about a million years for a discarded bottle to decompose.

And finally. Digging into history, it turns out that the Romans were engaged in nanotechnology 1600 years before we even invented the word. In the British Museum stands the “Lycurgus Cup” (4th century AD). If you look at it under normal lighting, it’s greenish and opaque. But if you place a light source inside the cup, the glass flashes bright rubin red.

Until the 1990s, scientists could not understand how this was achieved. An electron microscope showed: Roman craftsmen added gold and silver, ground to nanoparticles about 50 nanometers in size (about 1000-1800 times thinner than a hair). This size of particles triggers a quantum effect known as surface plasmon resonance: electrons in the metal begin to oscillate such that they absorb some wavelengths of light and let others pass depending on the angle of incidence. The funniest thing is that the Romans did this empirically, “by eye,” and we’ve only just learned to replicate this consciously in photonics. It’s crazy to think you could handle 50 nm gold dust by eye. This moment required additional googling.

It’s unlikely the Romans mechanically crushed the metal to 50 nanometers — they had no such mills.

More likely, they added gold and silver in the form of salts or foil to the molten glass mass. The nanoparticles formed not by crushing, but by crystallization and sedimentation from the melt under very precise temperature conditions (“glass prescription”). This is even more complex chemistry than simple grinding.

The most astonishing thing is not that they did it, but that the ratio of gold to silver was maintained perfectly. Changing the concentration of gold by just 1% would alter the color to something other than pure ruby red. This indicates that the craftsmen mastered the technology incredibly accurately, although they likely did not understand the mechanism. And that they had a heck of a lot of time for all kinds of nonsense;) probably many generations dedicated their lives to experimenting. Because it’s hard to see why all this was necessary.

There’s a beautiful hypothesis (unproven, but popular) that the cup could have been used as a detector. If you pour a different liquid into it (for example, alcohol with impurities or poison), the refractive index changes, and the color of the “flash” might vary.