OP
OP
Drago
Legendary Member
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Everyone knows its a supercooled liquid bronze.
Glass.
- Thread starter Drago
- Start date
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Everyone knows its a supercooled liquid bronze.
swansonj
Guru
Tl;dr: why are those the only choices?
"is glass a solid or liquid" is a deeply political question.
Nature does not start with separate categories then create things to populate one category or another. Nature simply allows the laws of physics to operate to create things. It is we humans (and, I'd suggest, we males in particular) who feel deeply unsettled by this infinite variety and feel a deep-seated need to impose some sort of order on it by creating categories. Naming things and putting them in neat boxes allows us to feel we have control over them.
Sometimes that works fine, because sometimes, things do happen to fall into fairly obvious and separate categories. But more often nature has produced a continuum and when we try to create categories, there are things at the boundaries that straddle our categories. And when those exceptions come along, we are often so wedded to our view of the world where everything falls into one category or another that we try to force the exceptions into one of our categories, rather than admit that it's our categorisation which is the problem.
Glasses are in most respects solid, entirely so colloquially. But not entirely so scientifically. The properties that don't fit with being a solid are not much to do with flow but quite a bit to do with the thermodynamics of phase transitions.
If the only categories available are solid or liquid, call them a solid, because that's what they are obviously closest to. But actually they are (scientifically speaking) neither solid nor liquid - they are, errr, glass.
Exceptions to simplistic definitions of solid and liquid are actually far more common than we usually admit but we are so used to assuming that our artificial categories reflect reality and forcing things into one or the other that we don't notice.
And "political"? Well, isn't this exactly the same binary paradigm and classification-driven thought process we bring to issues of gender, sex (male or female athletes), race (apartheid-era Africa and their classifications of mixed ethnicity people as either white or coloured) - to the detriment of society in every case?
"is glass a solid or liquid" is a deeply political question.
Nature does not start with separate categories then create things to populate one category or another. Nature simply allows the laws of physics to operate to create things. It is we humans (and, I'd suggest, we males in particular) who feel deeply unsettled by this infinite variety and feel a deep-seated need to impose some sort of order on it by creating categories. Naming things and putting them in neat boxes allows us to feel we have control over them.
Sometimes that works fine, because sometimes, things do happen to fall into fairly obvious and separate categories. But more often nature has produced a continuum and when we try to create categories, there are things at the boundaries that straddle our categories. And when those exceptions come along, we are often so wedded to our view of the world where everything falls into one category or another that we try to force the exceptions into one of our categories, rather than admit that it's our categorisation which is the problem.
Glasses are in most respects solid, entirely so colloquially. But not entirely so scientifically. The properties that don't fit with being a solid are not much to do with flow but quite a bit to do with the thermodynamics of phase transitions.
If the only categories available are solid or liquid, call them a solid, because that's what they are obviously closest to. But actually they are (scientifically speaking) neither solid nor liquid - they are, errr, glass.
Exceptions to simplistic definitions of solid and liquid are actually far more common than we usually admit but we are so used to assuming that our artificial categories reflect reality and forcing things into one or the other that we don't notice.
And "political"? Well, isn't this exactly the same binary paradigm and classification-driven thought process we bring to issues of gender, sex (male or female athletes), race (apartheid-era Africa and their classifications of mixed ethnicity people as either white or coloured) - to the detriment of society in every case?
Beebo
Firm and Fruity
- Location
- Hexleybeef
Although it is more fluid than glass, The pitch drop experiment is a good example of very slow flow of a seemingly solid material.
It has been on going since the 1930s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
It has been on going since the 1930s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
