@ScienceDesk Any deeper insight into the nature of glass might help scientists engineer better ones. “If you understand how physical properties emerge from a given [disordered] structure, then you can start making new materials,” Scalliet says. Like smartphone screens that are bendy, or less likely to break. Or making glass that can trap nuclear waste for longer and longer periods.
@ScienceDesk glass will still flow a tiny bit over millions and billions of years. If we lived for that long, and experienced the passage of time more quickly, we might not think glass is very mysterious at all. We might think it was a liquid.
@ScienceDesk This is the basic definition of a glass: a liquid that has been locked in place. Or, in science-speak: an “amorphous solid.” And it applies to a lot of materials, not just the silica-based glasses that hang in our windows or cover our phones.
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