re: flat glass

The reference below repeats an old wives tale about glass flowing. The
experiments that I'm familiar with have not demonstrated flowing of (common
soda-lime)glass at room temperature, even under stress. Window glass has
short range atomic order, and is not really a liquid in the sense that the
term is normally used. This is well known to glass technologists, and is
the basis of many interesting types of glass with unusal properties.
You can expect glass to behave as an elastic solid. OTOH, aluminum will
creep under rather low stress. Is aluminum a liquid at room temperature?

Elliot Burke

>Ballendo,

> Well, depends how long he's going to use the table! Glass flows on
>a geologic timescale - something like 10 million years for a window
>pane to get 5% thicker on the bottom at "normal" temps.

>http://www.sciam.com/askexpert/physics/physics12.html