eli5: why does glass absorb infrared and ultraviolet light, but not visible light?
In: Physics
Some of the other top responses do a somewhat decent job of approaching the answers to this problem but honestly, the real answer is somewhere between “we sort of know” and “you really need a PhD in physics or material science”. For example, take most of the top responses as ask this:
What’s the difference between frosted glass (found in shower doors or interior separation), silvered glass (also called a mirror), a lens, tinted glass (your car windows), polarized glass (your sunglasses), and low-emissivity glass (your double pane windows) and you’ll very very quickly run into some terrifying quantum phenomena and run into issues involving coherence, polarization vectors, complex index of refraction, permittivity tensors, evanescent fields and plasmon-polariton interactions. It really is a very simple question with a horrendously complicated answer that is barely captured by even one textbook.
So why do some varieties of glass absorb IR and UV? Because over the past millennium, we tried adding random shit to hot sand and cooling it in different ways until we found things that did that and it is in the nature of those types of glass to do that.
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