Not sure what made me think of this today, but I was having a Pepsi for the first time in awhile (don’t really drink the stuff much, not that it matters) and had a flashback to a memory from my childhood. To this day, I’m still not entirely sure what happened …
I was sitting at the dinner table in a similar situation, having a soda. The soda had been poured into a small glass with a few ice cubes. Being a little kid, I used to really like watching the soda fizz up when an ice cube was dropped in, so I was dropping in ice cubes one at a time and stirring with the long end of a spoon to make it fizz as much as possible. Suddenly, without any warning, the glass actually burst into shards as though a bullet had shot through it. Glass shards ended up all over the floor and my mom accidentally cut her foot on one. It didn’t seem to burst with the kind of destructive force you’d witness from an explosive, or even something like a dry ice bomb, because the glass shards didn’t travel far or hurt anyone. I don’t even remember if I got in trouble for breaking the glass, I was too baffled by the memory to remember much else.
I’m still baffled to this day … how would an open glass filled with a fizzy carbonated soda just shatter violently, even assuming you were causing it to fizz up by stirring it? There’s no buildup of pressure, so how could it have caused the glass to shatter? Perhaps this is just some sort of unexplainable case of the paranormal? :dubious:
Ok, then it was a paranormal event.
Achewlee, those old belled at the top Coke glasses broke very easily.
At first I thought temperature differential, but if you were stirring that shouldn’t have been much of a factor. Probably you just hit the edge of the glass with the spoon.
Sounds like it would be something to do with temperature differences,despite the stirring; one somewhat similar thing I’ve seen was when a red-hot piece of metal was quenched in water in a jam jar; the jar abruptly fractured in a more or less clean circular break at the level of the water surface.
Some ordinary drinking glasses are made with tempered glass, which does explode occasionally. I had an arcoroc tumbler explode on me while it sat undisturbed, and empty, on the coffee table once. It shot glass all over the room.
The main cause of spontaneous breakage in tempered glass is inclusions of nickel sulfide. The nickel gets into the glass during the manufacturing process, combines with sulfur to form sulfide crystals, which grow as the cold material ages until eventually the stress becomes too much for the glass. It’s a major problem in the tempered glass industry, as detailed here: Spontaneous Breakage.
IIRC, New Scientist ran an article a few years ago about a glassed in mall in England, where the architects had the misfortune of getting an entire shipment of panes containing sulfide inclusions. The result was spontaneous shardy havoc.
The more I think about it, the more I want to say there’s a distinct possibility that the glass was fresh out of the dishwasher. And I’m fairly certain it was tempered glass, too. I think it wasn’t long after that my mom bought a whole new set of glasses. You’re both onto something, but I’m not sure who’s actually right. Maybe you both are – I’m sure tempered glass is more likely to break if it’s fresh from the dishwasher and really warm, right before having a cold beverage poured into it and stirred around …
It may had something to do with the stirring as well. I was mixing cream and sugar into my coffee in my mothers coffee urn, when there was a slight “ting” as the spoon contacted the side. Next thing I knew there was a whump as the glass inside the urn shattered and everything kind of imploded as air rushed in to fill up the insulating vacuum. I wound up with a face full of hot coffee.
I believe it was a combination of the heat, cold milk, and coffee spoon which lead to this. Nothing happened when I added the milk, but as soon as the spoon hit the side, whammo!
I have had glasses break simply from two ice cubes being jammed together and then pouring room temperature liquid (water, soda, lemonade, whatever) over them. The sudden dosing of warm liquid makes the cubes crack apart and pokes the glass. Simple as that.
