Month: October 1997

Sometimes on television a high pitched noise breaks the windows in a house. I know that tubular objects such as wine glasses will break when the frequency corresponds to the natural frequencies of the glass, but does flat sheet glass such as windows experience this same effect? — RF, Jackson, Michigan

In real life, only explosive sounds will break normal glass. That’s because normal glass vibrates poorly and has no strong natural frequencies. You can see this by tapping a glass window or cup—all you hear is a dull “thunk” sound.

For an object to vibrate strongly in response to a tone, that object must exhibit a strong natural resonance and the tone’s pitch must be perfectly matched to the frequency of that resonance. A crystal wineglass vibrates well and emits a clear tone when you tap it. If you listen to the pitch of that tone and then sing it loudly, you can make the wineglass vibrate. A crystal windowpane would also have natural resonances and would vibrate in response to the right tones. But it would take very loud sound at exactly the right pitch to break this windowpane. A few extraordinary voices have been able to break crystal wineglasses unassisted (i.e., without amplification) and it would take such a voice to break the crystal windowpane.

Is glass in a gaseous state, a liquid state or a solid state? If I remember back to my freshman college year, it seems my prof said it was in a highly viscous state; therefore a liquid. — GC, Garland, Texas

The answer to that question is complicated—glass is neither a normal liquid nor a normal solid. While the atoms in glass are essentially fixed in place like those in a normal solid, they are arranged in the disorderly fashion of a liquid. For that reason, glass is often described as a frozen liquid—a liquid that has cooled and thickened to the point where it has become rigid. But calling glass a liquid, even a frozen one, implies that glass can flow. Liquids always respond to stresses by flowing. Since unheated glass can’t flow in response to stress, it isn’t a liquid at all. It’s really an amorphous or “glassy” solid—a solid that lacks crystalline order.

Can you get a suntan or sunburn through glass? — SD, Farmington, Utah

Yes, but not as quickly as without the glass. While glass absorbs short wavelength ultraviolet light, it does pass 350 to 400 nanometer ultraviolet. While this longer wavelength ultraviolet is less harmful than the shorter wavelength variety, you can still tan or burn if you get enough exposure. Glass is like sunscreen—it protects you pretty well but it isn’t perfect.

A center punch is a device used in extricating people from cars. You put tape over the glass window you want to pop, place the center punch in the corner of that window, and simply press inward. This does something that causes the glass to crack in a spider web pattern. The glass sticks to the tape, you push in enough glass to get your hand through, and knock the rest outward. This technique works on any window except the front windshield, which is 3 layers(glass, plastic, glass). Can you explain it? — RSG, Boston, Massachusetts

A center punch is a common tool used to dent a surface prior to drilling. The drill bit follows the pointed dent and the hole ends up passing right through it. But in the situation you describe, the center punch is being used to damage the surface of a car window. When you push the handle of the center punch inward, you are compressing a spring and storing energy. A mechanism inside the center punch eventually releases that spring and allows it to push a small metal cylinder toward the tip of the punch. This cylinder strikes the tip of the punch and pushes it violently into the glass. The glass chips.

In normal glass, this chipping would be barely noticeable. But the side and rear windows of a car are made of tempered glass—glass that has been heat processed in such a way that its surfaces are under compression and its body is under tension. Tempering strengthens the glass by making it more resistant to tearing. But once an injury gets through the compressed surface of the tempered glass and enters the tense body, the glass rips itself apart. The spider web pattern of tearing you observe is a feature of the tempered glass, not the center punch. Any deep cut or chip in the tempered glass will cause this “dicing fracture” to occur.