Sources Contact Advanced Search Tutorials

An Interest In:

Web News this Week

Search Archive

Some of Our Sources

View All Sources

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

March 17, 2020 04:46 pm

Physicists Chip Away at a Mystery: Why Does Glass Exist?

For decades, physicists have dreamed of this perfect amorphous solid. They desire ideal glass not so much for its own sake (though it would have unique, useful properties) but because its existence would solve a deep mystery. From a report: It's the mystery posed by every window and mirror, every piece of plastic and hard candy, and even the cytoplasm that fills every cell. All of these materials are technically glass, for glass is anything that's solid and rigid but made of disordered molecules like those in a liquid. Glass is a liquid in suspended animation, a liquid whose molecules curiously cannot flow. Ideal glass, if it exists, would tell us why. Inconveniently, ideal glass would take so long to form that it may not have done so in all of cosmic history. Physicists can only seek indirect evidence that, given unlimited time, it would. Ramos, an experimental physicist at the Autonomous University of Madrid, hoped that after 110 million years of aging, the Spanish amber might have started to show glimmers of perfection. If so, he would know what the molecules in ordinary glass are really doing when they appear to do nothing. Ramos's amber measurements are part of a surge of interest in ideal glass. In the past few years, new methods of making glass and simulating it on computers have led to unexpected progress. Major clues have emerged about the nature of ideal glass and its connection to ordinary glass. "These studies provide renewed support for the hypothesis of the existence of an ideal-glass state," said Ludovic Berthier, a physicist at the University of Montpellier who was centrally involved in the recent computer simulations. But the emerging picture of ideal glass only makes sense if we set aside one piece of evidence. "Indeed," Berthier said, "the amber work stands out as difficult to rationalize."

Slashdot

Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

More About this Source Visit Slashdot