EXPLAIN WHY GLASS IS TRANSPARENT?

Glass is a solid substance through which light can easily pass. This fact about glass is the most common to us. But we most of us do not know that due to which reason the glass become transparent. We are often wondered that how a solid substance can be invisible. To understand that, we have to at first understand what glass actually is, and where it comes from.

It all begins in the Earth’s crust where the two most common elements are silicon and oxygen. These react together to form Silicon dioxide, whose molecules arrange themselves into a regular crystalline form known as Quartz. Quartz is commonly found in sand. Yes, where it often makes up most of the grains and is the main ingredient in most type of glass. Of course, you probably noticed that glass isn’t made of multiple tiny bits of quartz, and for good reason.

For one thing the edges of the rigidly formed grains and smaller defects within the crystal structure reflect and disperse light that hits them.

But when the quartz is heated high enough the extra energy makes the molecules vibrate until they break the bonds holding them together and become a flowing liquid, the same way that ice melts into water. Unlike water, though liquid silicon dioxide does not reform into a crystal solid when it cools. Instead, as the molecules lose energy, they are less and less able to move into an ordered position, and as a result the Amorphous solid is formed. So the glass is a solid material with the disorderly structure of a liquid, which allows the molecules to freely fill in any gaps. Hence glass is also called as pseudo solid.

This makes the surface of glass uniform on a microscopic level, allowing light to strike it without being scattered or deflect or disperse in different directions.

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