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Scientists discover transparent aluminum, Mongomery Scott unavailable for comment.

Very cool. I think BenBurch would be interested in this. If I remember correctly, he had a thread that addressed the physical state of glass.
 
This scientist also supposedly claims that glass is not a solid. I suspect the person writing the article had no idea what he was talking about and invented most of it.

News flash for FOX "news": Glass is a solid. It is NOT a liquid. Period.

And very old glass -does- crystallize, not over billions of year, but over centuries. This is a transformation from a glass to a crystalline solid, not to a "true solid".
 
Madalch said:
This scientist also supposedly claims that glass is not a solid. I suspect the person writing the article had no idea what he was talking about and invented most of it.

News flash for FOX "news": Glass is a solid. It is NOT a liquid. Period.

And very old glass -does- crystallize, not over billions of year, but over centuries. This is a transformation from a glass to a crystalline solid, not to a "true solid".
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I thought glass was a super-cooled liquid...

My Chemistry teacher demonstrated this by showing us measurments of an old piece of window glass, noting that the bottom of the pane was thicker than the top, demonstrating that the glass was still 'flowing' down.

A solid is 'stable', in shape and form.
 
King of the Americas said:
My Chemistry teacher demonstrated this by showing us measurments of an old piece of window glass, noting that the bottom of the pane was thicker than the top, demonstrating that the glass was still 'flowing' down.
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Then your chemistry teacher fell for one of the oldest urban myths in the books. Glass does NOT flow.
 
King of the Americas said:
I thought glass was a super-cooled liquid...

My Chemistry teacher demonstrated this by showing us measurments of an old piece of window glass, noting that the bottom of the pane was thicker than the top, demonstrating that the glass was still 'flowing' down.

A solid is 'stable', in shape and form.
Click to expand...

Old techniques of glass making did not result in a sheet that had even thickness, therefore when cutting a piece of glass you'd usually find one edge was thicker than another.

The glass in some of my windows is just over a hundred years old and in many of the panes it is thicker at the bottom. Explanation? The glazier put the thicker edge at the bottom.
 
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Madalch said:
Then your chemistry teacher fell for one of the oldest urban myths in the books. Glass does NOT flow.
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I think you're being unfair here. Glass may not flow on a human timescale, but it may well do over epochs OR it could crystallize. Over the same time period.

I think my fluid mechanics lecturer referred to glass as the ultimate viscous fluid.

Do you want glass to be a state of matter or a subset of solids?
 
I already have an aluminum oxide crystal on my watch which is basically transparent aluminum. Otherwise known as sapphire...
 
NewtonTrino said:
I already have an aluminum oxide crystal on my watch which is basically transparent aluminum. Otherwise known as sapphire...
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Aluminum =/= aluminum oxide. Would you consider sodium and sodium chloride to be the same thing? If so, remind me to never eat you cooking.
 
I learned the flowing-glass model when I was in school.

I'm really not concerned about the categorization problems that people have had with glass in the past. I don't think the discussion accomplishes much.

I am very interested in what we're learning about glass now and how it may enhance our use of it.
 
Where is the transparent aluminium in this article? The thread title is a bit misleading......

On a similar note:
The material sold under the trademark ALON is actually Aluminium oxynitride (see wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride) and is the closest, it seems to transparent aluminium, but is not actually transparent metal as it is technically a ceramic. This stuff was created in 2005 and is being considered for armor, I believe.
 
Alareth said:
Scientists have discovered that it may be possible to manipulate the structure of glass to make it rigid and metal like
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The story does not say this. I think you've misunderstood it's actually the other way around. (The article is obviously written by someone who doesn't actually understand and they are not clear)

Metals can be cooled (very rapidly) to form an amorphous structure (no long range crystal structure). Glass is an amorphous structure so these materials would share the same morphology. Because of this, amorphous metal(lic)s are often called "glassy metals" or "metallic glasses". The term "glass" refers to the structure and is not related to amorphous metals being transparent, which they are not. So no transparent aluminum for us or Scotty.

Aircraft wings made of glass? It's not really correct terminology and is misleading.

I suspect that these materials will take a very long time to develop so that there full properties can be made to bear on a large scale just the same as carbon nano-tubes will take time and technology to produce large structures.
 
Misleading title...

I'd have to agree ALON is closer to Transparent Aluminum as it's transparent and it's got aluminum in it (and it's sturdy as hell).

However, the idea of making metals without crystalline boundaries (which is mentioned in the article) is not entirely new. Jet engines use single-crystal turbines (although they actually are technically directionally solidified with magnetic fields to try and eliminate as much grain boundary as possible, but there are still barely discernable grain boundaries to the best of my knowledge -- in other words, they're not a macromolecule) which offer extreme temperature and structural sturdiness.

INRM
 
Madalch said:
Aluminum =/= aluminum oxide. Would you consider sodium and sodium chloride to be the same thing? If so, remind me to never eat you cooking.
Click to expand...

So the stuff that Scotty was showing in IV was just plain aluminum? You obviously have to do SOMETHING to it to make it transparent. Personally I think they were referring to Sapphire because a way to easily manufacture big sheets like in the movie would make it a very useful commodity.
 
NewtonTrino said:
So the stuff that Scotty was showing in IV was just plain aluminum? You obviously have to do SOMETHING to it to make it transparent. Personally I think they were referring to Sapphire because a way to easily manufacture big sheets like in the movie would make it a very useful commodity.
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Corundum can be and is manufactured in industrial quantities and massive blocks- if that's what Scotty was referring to, he would have simply called it corundum (technically, it's not sapphire unless it is gem-quality and containing impurities to give it colour, unless those impurities are chromium(III) ions, in which case it's ruby....).

But I think the stuff that Scotty was actually showing in IV was merely a Hollywood prop, and I don't see that its constitution is actually relevant.
 
It's still Sapphire if it's clear AFAIK as long as it's pure.

Otherwise we are really just arguing semantics imho.
 
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