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 halogen bulb uses a chemical trick to prolong the life of its filament. In a regular bulb, the filament slowly thins as tungsten atoms evaporate from the white-hot surface. These lost atoms are carried upward by the inert gases inside the bulb and gradually darken the bulb’s upper surface. In a halogen bulb, the gases surrounding the filament are chemically active and don’t just deposit the lost atoms at the top of the bulb. Instead, they react with those tungsten atoms to form volatile compounds. These compounds float around inside the bulb until they collide with the filament again. The extreme heat of the filament then breaks the compounds apart and the tungsten atoms stick to the filament.
This tungsten recycling process dramatically slows the filament’s decay. Although the filament gradually develops thin spots that eventually cause it to fail, the filament can operate at a higher temperature and still last two or three times as long as the filament of a regular bulb. The hotter filament of a halogen bulb emits relatively more blue light and relatively less infrared light than a regular bulb, giving it a whiter appearance and making it more energy efficient.
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.
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.
Whenever you wipe a CD to clean it, there is a chance that you will scratch its surface. If that scratch is wide enough, it may prevent the player’s optical system from reading the data recorded beneath it and this loss of data may make the CD unplayable. It turns out that tangential scratches are much more serious than radial scratches. When the scratch is radial (extending outward from the center of the disc to its edge), the player should still be able to reproduce the sound without a problem. That’s because sound information is recorded in a spiral around the disc and there is error-correcting information included in each arc shaped region of this spiral. Since a radial scratch only destroys a small part of each arc it intersects, the player can use the error correcting information to reproduce the sound perfectly.
But when the scratch is tangential (extending around the disc and along the spiral), it may prevent the player from reading a large portion of an arc. If the player is unable to read enough of the arc to perform its error correcting work, it can’t reproduce the sound. That’s why a tangential scratch can ruin a CD much more easily than a radial scratch can. That’s why you should never wipe a CD tangentially. Always clean them by wiping from the center out.
You’re right about the glass expanding along with the liquid inside it. But liquids normally expand more than solids as their temperatures increase. That’s because the atoms and molecules in a liquid have more freedom to move around than those in a solid and they respond to increasing temperatures by forming less and less tightly packed arrangements. Since the liquid in a thermometer expands more than the glass container around it, the liquid level rises as the thermometer’s temperature increases.
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.
A CD player reads ahead of the sound it is playing so that it always has sound information from at least one full turn of the disc in its memory. It has to read ahead as part of the error correcting process—the sound information associated with one moment in time is actually distributed around the spiral rather than squeezed into one tiny patch. This reading ahead is particularly important for a portable CD player, which usually saves several seconds of sound information in its memory so that it will have time to recover if its optical system is shaken out of alignment. When you pause the CD player, it reads ahead until its memory is full and then lets its optical system hover while the disc continues to turn. When you unpause the player, it uses the sound information it has saved in its memory to continue where it left off and its optical system resumes the reading ahead process.
A hot water heater is built so that hot water is drawn out of its top and cold water enters it at its bottom. Since hot water is less dense than cold water, the hot water floats on the cold water and they don’t mix significantly. As you take your shower, you slowly deplete the hot water at the top of the tank and the level of cold water rises upward. But the shower doesn’t turn cold until almost all the hot water has left the tank and the cold water level has risen to its top.
The simple answer is entropy—the ever-increasing disorder of the universe. Salt water is far more disordered than the salt and water from which it’s formed, so separating those components doesn’t happen easily. The second law of thermodynamics observes that the entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease—you can’t reduce the disorder of the salty water without paying for it elsewhere. In effect, you have to export the salty water’s disorder somewhere else as you separate it into pure water and pure salt.
In most cases, this exported disorder winds up in the energy used to desalinating sea water. You start with nicely ordered energy—perhaps electricity or gasoline—and you end up with junk energy such as waste heat. While some desalination techniques such as reverse osmosis can operate near the efficiency limits imposed by thermodynamics, they can’t avoid those limits. If you want to desalinate water, you must consume ordered resources and those resources usually cost money (an exception is sunlight). The desalinating equipment is also expensive. Until water becomes scarce enough or energy cheap enough, desalinated water will remain uncommon in the United States.