Why cold glass can't flow
Why cold glass can't flow
Learn if cold glass can flow.
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Transcript
Many church windows are small works of art, and as ancient as the walls that surround them. A legend surrounding them is also very old. Church windows are said to be thicker at the bottom than they are at the top. It is claimed that the glass has slowly seeped to the bottom, like a very thick liquid. Does cold glass really behave like sticky honey?
In liquids, molecules move about with great freedom. This is why they are able to flow. Glass, too, is made up of molecules. However, these molecules are not free to move, they are frozen solid and there is no movement whatsoever. Glass has almost exactly the same properties as crystal, which is also made up of molecules. The difference between crystal and glass is that crystals have a regular periodic structure. From a physical perspective this means that glass cannot flow, that is it cannot be thicker at the bottom. So does that mean the legend surrounding glass is utterly bogus? Perhaps we'll find the answer at the Glashütte Lamberts glass factory on the German-Czech border. Here they make panes of glass as people did in the Middle Ages. The gob of molten glass is blown into a bulb, and then the glassblower forms it into a long cylindrical shape. It doesn't yet look like a windowpane, but the glassblowers aren't quite finished.
The glassblowers take a critical step forward creating a pane of glass using a trick. The glass cylinder with its ends removed is put in the oven one more time so it can be shaped again. A simple block of wood is used to flatten the glass into a pane. But we wanted to know one more thing. How thick is the pane of glass? To answer this question they perform a test especially for us. The glassmaker shows us if the pane of glass is of the same thickness everywhere on its surface. And here is the result: 2.51 millimeters at one end and 3.04 millimeters at the other. This means that if an old pane of glass varies in thickness, it was always like that from the very beginning.
In liquids, molecules move about with great freedom. This is why they are able to flow. Glass, too, is made up of molecules. However, these molecules are not free to move, they are frozen solid and there is no movement whatsoever. Glass has almost exactly the same properties as crystal, which is also made up of molecules. The difference between crystal and glass is that crystals have a regular periodic structure. From a physical perspective this means that glass cannot flow, that is it cannot be thicker at the bottom. So does that mean the legend surrounding glass is utterly bogus? Perhaps we'll find the answer at the Glashütte Lamberts glass factory on the German-Czech border. Here they make panes of glass as people did in the Middle Ages. The gob of molten glass is blown into a bulb, and then the glassblower forms it into a long cylindrical shape. It doesn't yet look like a windowpane, but the glassblowers aren't quite finished.
The glassblowers take a critical step forward creating a pane of glass using a trick. The glass cylinder with its ends removed is put in the oven one more time so it can be shaped again. A simple block of wood is used to flatten the glass into a pane. But we wanted to know one more thing. How thick is the pane of glass? To answer this question they perform a test especially for us. The glassmaker shows us if the pane of glass is of the same thickness everywhere on its surface. And here is the result: 2.51 millimeters at one end and 3.04 millimeters at the other. This means that if an old pane of glass varies in thickness, it was always like that from the very beginning.