The Strange Life of Glass
Glass is perhaps the most frequently overlooked material in history. It is essential to our lives, more so even than plastic. A world without glass is more unimaginable to me than terraforming Mars (practically an impossibility, most scientists agree). Without this banal marvel, you wouldn’t be able to use a touch-screen phone, switch on a lamp, look out a window, put on your glasses, sip from that bottle on your nightstand. You wouldn’t be able to receive emails or phone calls or access the Internet.
In an article for The Atlantic, glass is called “humankind’s most important material.” Douglas Main writes, “To reach you, these words were encoded into signals of light moving about 125,000 miles per second through fiber-optic cables,” which climb up mountains, creep under oceans, making tracks through cities and countries, all around the globe. The glass within is thinner than a human hair and “30 times more transparent than the purest water.” Glass allows us to see and be seen, hear and be heard, to illuminate our rooms and lives and thoughts.
From a thermodynamic point of view, glass wants to become a solid.
But glass is a funny material, partially because the word
