How does glass become transparent if it’s made of sand. My lil brainy can’t make sense of small rocks (my knowledge of sand) becoming transparent by any process like melting or pressure.
In: Chemistry
If you’re wondering why glass is clear but not other materials, it’s because glass is mostly silicon dioxide, the same thing as quartz. In quartz it’s a crystal, a perfect lattice of interconnected molecules. In glass they’re randomly arranged and frozen into place.
It’s clear to visible light because none of its atoms have electrons whose energy matches the wavelengths of visible light – if they matched, an electron could absorb that photon and store it as energy – so they just pass on through. However, it DOES match for infrared, so if you tried looking through glass with a thermal camera it would look solid.
This is also the cause of the greenhouse effect – visible light goes through glass, hits something that CAN absorb it, it’s re-emitted as thermal light, which is BLOCKED by glass, so the energy stays trapped and keeps warming up like a bucket filling with water faster than it drains.
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