How does Transparency?

[Qfwfq]

Yeah I got it, it lets light through. But how? This is what i don't get.

What I don't get, I mean what I really don't get, is how the devil some materials block light!

 

I mean, a solid material is almost totally empty space!

 

Oh while I am on subject of transparency, since glass is tansparent, I heard glass is actuelly a fluid, is this true? :hihi:

Absolutely true.

 

Glass is a liquid of very high viscosity. It doesn't have a definite melting point with latent heat, it just gets less viscous as temperature rises.

[CraigD]

What I don't get, I mean what I really don't get, is how the devil some materials block light!

 

I mean, a solid material is almost totally empty space!

It’s easy to be perplexed by the apparent unlikeliness of tiny photons colliding with tiny electrons in even a large volume of the thinly populated space that is ordinary solid matter. If you consider these particles to be classical (like tiny pool balls), and analyze things mathematically, the model comes no where near describing observed reality – one of the reason why 19th century physicists, who were good at such calculations, favored a model of the atom where the nucleus was large and solid, and the electrons were physically embedded in its surface, until Bragg & son shot that theory full of holes around 1913.

 

What resolved this confusion for me was coming to an intuitive grasp that, at the sub-atomic scale, photons and electrons aren’t well described as classical particles. Their quantum wave function (Psi) make them “smear out” probabilistically, so that they in effect occupy much larger volumes than their classical “size analogy” implies. Their “collisions” aren’t like ordinary collisions between pool balls, but are wave interactions.

 

Unfortunately, quantum wave mechanics are much less mathematically intuitive and facile than classical mechanics, making them less satisfying for people around my level of Math skill - I can follow simple textbook examples enough to accept that the more complicated work that follows is correct, but can’t perform of verify the calculations myself.

[Qfwfq]

:hihi: Now I think of it, I seem to remember some stuff like that from RQFT.

[Avarice]

<A HREF="http://msgboard.snopes.com/message/ultimatebb.php?/ubb/get_topic/f/39/t/000919.html">Glass, liquid or solid?</A>

 

 

"Glass is an amorphous solid, which means that it hardens without crystallizing."

 

That's about all I could conclude on that topic.

[Qfwfq]

That's a correct statement but brief and concise. I'm sure more can be found by looking up latent heat and melting point too.

 

Basically, the hardening and softening of an amorphous solid isn't like melting and solidification. True melting is a change of phase which occurs at a definite temperature (melting point) with heat being absorbed to change from solid to liquid. It's called latent heat because it holds the temperature still despite the heat supplied.

 

An old pane of glass that's been standing vertical in a window for a hundred years is usually something like a thin layer of honey a while after the slice of bread is turned vertical. Glass only flows far slower than honey at room temperature. As it gets hotter it gets softer.

 

BTW, if you want a link to work you should use the URL tag in BBCode instead of HTML notation.

[sergey500]

I see. Thanks for all you're responses. Yeah, I wasn't around for awhile, I dropped in and out and noticed most things weren't updated so it sort of turned out I was avoiding this site, sorry about that. Anhywho, I am back.

 

CraigD, thanks, that was very well explained. Actuelly, it was too good of an explanation and made me dry out of comments. Which is very very rare. But thankfully you didn't let the thread die so easily and posted an intresting question. Which I am assuming you know the answer too, I would have to guess without research that the frequency of the the eletron is so high that is doesn't allow the photon to pass, instead it kicks it off elsewhere. So it basicly rejects all wavelength frequencies...all the colors. (I really should give it a try to put at least a little thought into this, that sounded ridiculous).

 

 

Arkain101, what are you talking about? Light is created through levels of deepness in the color spectrum. That all. Like black to white, you see certain levels of gray? Thats the same thing for colors, all 256 levels of them. You take basic prism colors, the colors of rainbow and look deeper into them. You will get the rest of the color. Each color is a different frequency that an atom reject. As group they reject a one frequency or more. Like yellow and blue, green is rejected, thus we see green. While the other colors, the frequencies are absorbed. The atom didn't event color, we did...well our brains did. We see the colors as it truly is in the world. We are limited to the colors we see, but we know there are more colors and different types of lights because our equipment can pick it up. Or I could be wrong. Probably am.

 

Well it seems we got two responses for the glass, one is that is a liquid with an extremely high viscosity. While the other explanation is that is "Glass is an amorphous solid, which means that it hardens without crystallizing"

 

Well then, asides for that question this thrread seems pretty much dead. My question has been answer by the first page and I have no comments about it. Both a rare events.

 

Thanks for you're help!

[Qfwfq]

one is that is a liquid with an extremely high viscosity. While the other explanation is that is "Glass is an amorphous solid, which means that it hardens without crystallizing"

Actually, these are just two ways of saying the same thing. If you like, one is an explanation of the other's meaning. :steering:

[sergey500]

Well I didn't give much thought about that or anything else. As I stated, "I should really think this out more" or something like that, I wasn't exactly thinking when I was typing. I must've just scanned through the answers and noticed they were worded differently.