Well silly, that’s because it’s a ROOT VEGETABLE!
But I feel your pain.
a little lower, Monica, please
Another recent article to add to the collection.
Or it’s the seventh inning.
Yet another scholarly article on the “is glass a liquid” debate. This time, the authors are introducing a technical distinction between a true solid and a “frozen liquid”:
Since the thread has be re-awakened, here’s the updatedlive feed for the Pitch Drop Experiment. The site asks you to register because it keeps track of the time you spend watching - and ranks you against other watchers.
Is there a site where I can watch a live video feed of paint drying instead?
It’s the internet, so probably. Most of my first google grab brought up what looked like static pictures labeled “Watching Paint Dry”. There were a couple of YouTube videos, about ten minutes long.
Maybe this is a niche waiting to be filled.
Just snag a copy of Paint Drying, a film that the filmmaker made as a protest against the BBFC.
Okay, as a layperson, I’ll bite: are there combinations of temperature and pressure where glass is unarguably a solid?
How come no one ever asks if peanut butter is a solid or a liquid? Or Silly Putty? Or glue? Why is it always glass? =)
It seems to me that the trichotomy of solid-liquid-gas we all learned in elementary school is really applicable primarily to substances composed of single elements or compounds. Solutions and colloids and other mixtures don’t always adhere to those strict categories.
Powers &8^]
Is glass a solution or colloid?
There’s also a tremendous possible variety of fluids which are neither liquids nor gases. A liquid is a fluid whose density is constant. A gas is a fluid whose density is proportional to its pressure divided by its temperature. But there are many other possible formulas for density (called “equations of state”) for fluids, many of which are known in nature. Just, not typically under Earthly conditions.
How can you melt glass if it’s not a solid? Does it cut your foot? Does it flow when pressure is applied to it?
Now, I’ve always heard glass at room temperatures is an amorphous solid.
There’s also the Corn Cam. Corn is in the grass family, so you can watch grass grow.
Powers, I do agree that the solid-liquid-gas trichotomy only applies to single substance materials - either elements or compounds. That is part of the definition.
What is tricky is that glass appears to be a single substance, but doesn’t crystallize under normal conditions.
I’m disturbed by this definition of a “frozen liquid”. It messes with the definitions of frozen and liquid. Freezing, by definition, is the process of solidifying. Maybe they could call it a “hard liquid” vs “amorphous solid”. Or, if one really wants to get scientific on the matter, they could define a new state of matter - “glass: a type of fluid distinct from liquid, gas, and plasma that is hard like a solid but has an amorphous structure rather than a crystalline one and deforms spontaneously over time and under minimal pressure less than gravity, and which transitions to a crystalline solid state over time.” Or whatever properties it has that keep them from calling it a solid.
Side note: is that 1g gravity or the gravity of the material itself, because put enough steel together at it will deform under the strength of it’s own gravity - that’s why planets are not cubes (well, maybe not cubes, but cubular, kind of like the Earth is sort of spherical but has a lot of bumps and distortions due to spin and such).
Irishman, the authors acknowledge that there is a “glass transition temperature” which, as glass blowers are well familiar with, marks the point at which glass can practically be worked. I think what the authors were saying is that glass has no minimum force to deform- any force whatsoever will, however slowly, make it deform. Whereas a “true” solid has some finite point at which (barring quantum tunneling) it will maintain its shape forever.
BTW: some threads on the meme that cathedral windows are old enough to show deformation-
You might want to read up on the issue via the MANY threads we’ve had discussing it over the years… 
I’ve read about it. But amorphous solids are still solid.
Some of those threads are old enough to show deformation.
One of my college profs told us glass was a liquid. Okay, he was a Geography professor. But he had us convinced that the glass in windows grew thicker toward the bottom and thinner at top due to “running.”