For a large part of human history, people made things out of what they could find. Some stones form the head of the arrow. Others create sparks. Trees can turn into wood. But the real strength is when you can take those same materials and make them into something with very different properties. For example, plant fibers turn into cloth, or rocks leave the metals inside. Glass is one of the oldest engineering materials. You may think it is as old as glass (at least 4,500 years ago), so far we can understand what we know about it. According to an interesting post by [Jon Cartwright] Written in the world of physics, we do not. Not a long shot.
According to [Jon] There are at least five “glass mysteries” that we still do not understand. Of course, sand, soda and lime are easy to melt – something we’ve said before – but, in reality, many materials can turn to glass if they solidify faster than liquids and cool faster. The problem is, we don’t really understand why this happens.
The point about almost anything can be glazed, really interesting. Did you know that ants behave like glass at ant colonies and music festivals? Simulated annealing – a computer algorithm for dealing with difficult optimization problems – is also exploiting the kind of behavior we see in glass.
It is difficult to turn metal into glass. You need to cool it very quickly, sometimes at billions of degrees per second. But the debt is much bigger. Without any grain boundaries, metallic glass does not wear easily and does not absorb kinetic energy easily. For example, a ball bearing will hit a steel plate and bounce several times, but the plate will quickly absorb the bearing force. A metal glass plate, however, will absorb much less energy than bearings. Want to see? Watch the video below.
We talked about how glass is made with other old engineering materials. If you have a laser cutter, you may be able to do 3D print glass without using insane temperatures (the link to that post is dead, but the videos are still there).