h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...but Io, Jupiter's inner-most moon, is the most volcanically active body in the solar system - beating the Earth.

Its close proximity to it's parent planet combined with an eliptical orbit cause by the rotation of a fellow moon Europa heat the core of the moon. The heat produced by this is phenomenal. Io, is tiny but kilo for kilo it is 300 times more active than the Earth.

I´ve also heard that glass shouldn´t be liquid. That the reason the glass panes are thicker at the bottom is that they weren´t cut all that well. And then they put them with the thick end down because that would make them more solid. But I don´t know about patterns made out of glass, you can´t just flip the glass there without damaging the pattern.

Maybe it is simply a bit soft. Like with clay, not a liquid just a soft solid.

I went to bed and missed a lot, it seems.
If you drink far too much carrot/orange juice/Sunny Delight, you turn yellow. Then you die. (If it was from Sunny Delight, you probably won't decompose.)
I know someone who once had a stained-glass window in their house. One of the panes was red, with most of the colour being concentrated at the bottom- it did look like it had run. (He, however, told me that he'd made the window himself and cut his wrist on it. It is people like him who gave me treasured illusions.)

I have never heard that glass might be/is a liquid before. That is actually pretty interesting. I just don't see how though. Maybe the person that supposedly discovered that glass is a liquid was looking at and measuring a defective piece of glass. I guess you could find out by heating glass to a very very high temperature and see if it melts first or vaporizes(turns into gas) first. If it melts first and becomes liquid, then I would think that would mean that gas is a solid. If it vaporizes first and becomes a gas, then I would think that it actually might, just might be a liquid.

Ehh, how do you think they actually make the glass stuff? But I don´t think that actually solves anything. It might be the viscosity of the liquid simply goes up or something. And hopefully the guy who came up with the theory examined several pieces of glass.

The guy who came up with the theory probably did examine several pieces of glass but they could have all been defective especially if they all came from one location or if they were all cut by the same machine. I wonder if a carved glass figure would eventually turn into an indistinguishable blob.

I heard once that all pet Guinea Pigs are descended from one peruvian breeding pair.

Where did the peruvian breeding pair come from?
The peruvian breeding pair had to come from somewhere so they both must have had parents too.

Isn't glass actually called a supercooled liquid ?

Thats what we have been talking about. We were talking about glass being a supercooled liquid.

It would appear glass isn't a liquid, it's an amorphous solid. The distinction is that a crystalline solid has a regular lattice, whereas a glass has an irregular lattice, thereby taking up greater volume. That's why silica glass is a better insulator than silica quartz. To make a glass you need to cool the substance to a temperature below its glass transition which is below the freezing point sufficiently fast for crystals not to form. You can make a glass out of almost anything - even water - if you put enough effort into it.

...yes, but their parents were wild Guinea pigs (what a cool concept) not pet Guinea pigs.

Mycroft

Could you make a glass out of person?

Yup. Glass is a bit like treacle, or syrup, or molasses. Some materials have a distinct melting point, while glass just gets more and more viscous as it cools down. So very old windows tend to be thicker at the bottom because the glass has actually flowed down over the decades. I think modern glass is more resistant to that sort of thing, but don't quote me on that.

Would person glass be transparent ?

That would be really cool to have a glass person. There are some people whom I definately wouldn't mind trying that with

Dang. too slow off the draw...
To make the glassy (vitreous) form of water you have to plunge small drops very rapidly into something pretty cold (liquid nitrogen, for example). At least, that's what I remember form first year chemistry. Doing a whole person would be a toughy.
Although, if you did manage it you would be able to freeze people without harm. Perfect for these long space voyages.

It would bring a whole new meaning to someone having a Glass Jaw

Float glass doesn't bulge at the bottom - yet: it's only been around for about 50 years, so I suppose there's still time.

Hello,

It's not a supercooled liquid, since that term is actually a bit silly. To see what I mean, imagine calling steel a supercooled liquid since they mold it when it's hot and molten, so the current form is just that liquid cooled down, right? But you'd think I'm crazy if I suggested that steel flowed around. It goes through a phase transition as part of cooling, so the atoms just don't move around and it's a solid. Glass does the same thing. The amorphous bit merely means it doesn't have any sort of regular crystalline structure, but its atoms are still pretty fixed where they are.

Also, to be confusing, glass is referred to a whole class of solid materials with the same quality. What we call glass would probably be more technically known as "silica glass".

Yours,
Jake