Why Glass?

Why do a blog about glass? Or more importantly, why would an internet communications university student do a blog about glass? Well, I was not always a university student. The first 8 years of my working life were spent as a qualified Glazier, well technically only 4. It did take 4 years to ‘become’ a Glazier. But aside from that, glass is an amazing substance. And it offers us a way to observe a completely different environment from the one we are standing in. A glazing example of this would be a window. Look at it like this, while you stand in your climate controlled home or office you can gaze out the nearest window and marvel at the wonders of mother nature, without having to be ‘in’ that environment.

But aside from the general wonders of glass, like all people I would assume, there was a single moment were I went from thinking about doing a blog on glass, to actually writing a blog about glass. That moment came in September of this year when I read, through the grapevine of social media, that the Guinness World Records was officially recognising the accidental work of some university scientists. That while performing an experiment they noticed a gunk build up, which later turned out to be a single molecule thick piece of glass. The fact Guinness was recognising it was not what inspired me, but what this discovery will mean for glass. See the problem up until now was that the way glass molecules interact, and change, at the point of breaking or bending was only theorized. No one had been able to view the effects. Also, super thin glass could result in all sorts of advancements in transistors and nanotechnology.

So there you have it, the reason/s why I chose to write about glass. It is not just that glass offers a window to different environments, such as windows, fish tanks, or terrariums. But that glass is important part of modern technology, and now that we can understand how it works better, we can move forward with tinnier and more efficient devices.