The Nature of Glass: Technologies of Transparency, Materials on the Move

journals.uchicago.edu

22 points·drdee··5 comments

Whilst reading The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, I was struck by the casual glassblowing. For some reason I assumed the machine-shop/engineer division of labor, but no. William Shockley was a glassblower. Gordon Moore was a glassblower. I wanna be a glassblower

OT: One of the heads of the US Navy during WW2 strongly believed that the submarine should be made of glass.

He worked towards that his entire career, but was rebuffed by his peers - for non technical reasons.

I don't remember the details, but am thinking of how that would psychologically have change the way we relate to glass, and the research of its properties and uses

If you seek an interesting scientific explainer on the nature of glass, look elsewhere.

Interestingly, the nature of glass is one of the most important open problems in physics.

"The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and the glass transition. This could be the next breakthrough of the coming decade. The solution of the problem of spin glass in the late 1970s had broad implications in unexpected fields like neural networks, computer algorithms, evolution, and computational complexity. The solution of the more important and puzzling glass problem may also have a substantial intellectual spin-off. Whether it will help make better glass is questionable." P. W. Anderson, Princeton, 1995. (In Science, "Through the Glass Lightly.")

Still unsolved, but of considerable interest.

"The Glass Age"[0](multipart) by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12OSBJwogFc

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