Further study is required. Cheers!
And others assisted with the fake bit about windows being thicker at the bottom...
Young grunt an easy target! But tough.
By the way, old glass was spun as a disk, thicker at the outside edge...
Frank, get it right this time.
So is neither masculine or feminine but neuter......It’s an IT.
I have always recalled back in high school in the 60’s about learning glass was a liquid and they used glass from old buildings as evidence where some how it sagged over time.
Great to hear this. There are some good places on this planet where the physics can and should be tested...
Places needing a glass testing.
My nephew told me once that his science teacher told him that glass wasn’t a solid. I said his science teacher was stupid. It turns out I was.
Look, the physics of glass (and everything else) can be explained by Global Warming. Glass used to be a solid. But the Earth is much warmer these days. So now glass is a liquid.
Where do I go to collect my Nobel Prize?
For window panes?
I think it started out as a cylinder, as for say a glass bottle made by a glass blower.
While still hot, it's placed on a cooling table with an engraved template, for wont of a better description.
The ends are cut to the template, and the cylinder split and laid out, then also cut.
If you look at old windows, you'll see that they consist of small panes. I'm guess that pane size was deemed the most efficient for production for glass blowers at the time.
Glass is lucist.
Further study is required. Cheers!
Years ago to test the theory some researcher went to hundreds of years old cathedrals in Europe to measure the thickness of glass at the top of stained glass windows - and at the bottom. Sure enough the glass at the bottom was thicker...
Hm I knew a glass manufacturer who owned a colonial home with original windows. He said the bottoms of the panes had settled and were thicker at the bottom. He absolutely believed that.
Glass is a transparent stable form of Silly Putty.
I was just a kid in 1939 when my folks took us to the World’s Fair in New York. We went to a Corning Glass exhibit where a guy blew what looked like a goldfish bowl. He said if anybody could guess what it was, they would have it. Wrong answers for a few minutes, then he said “It’s a dish!”, grabbed the end and flattened it out. I thought it was magic.
Nothing fake about it. It also happens with glass tubing, which is why tubing in glassblower's shops is stored vertically rather than horizontally.
‘said Northwestern’s Sinan Keten’
‘Wenjie Xia, an assistant professor’
I still remember the days when at least a few Americans did research. I’m getting old, I guess.
What has interested me about glass for decades is glass thickness and thermal shock. Because molten glass cools faster at outer edges than at inner area it fractures or even explodes from thermal shock after it has cooled.
Thick glass has to be annealed (slowly cooled in kiln) to prevent thermal shock. But really thick glass has to be annealed for days even weeks, which is expensive. Thus seldom do you find glass over 2 inches thick.
I have researched ways to make really thick glass without annealing. So far I haven’t found a way, except pure quartz glass which has such low thermal shock properties it can be poured very thick without annealing. But because quartz has such a high melting point it is very expensive to produce and difficult to work with.
Kilning quartz is the most practical way to get molten or even just softened quartz but you are very limited in shapes, and limited in sizes without a very large industrial expensive kilns.
A laser that can concentrate beam to get quartz to melting temperature is possible, and induction is another.
Any other ideas FReepers?