why is glass transparent but other things are not? As in, why can you see through glass but not say a wall?
In: Physics
Light is not reduced to the light we, humans, can see. As a matter of fact X-rays, Ultraviolet, Infrared, Microwaves, Radio waves, Wifi are all different types of light and Visible light is just a portion of the whole spectrum. Transparency is not reduced to visible light. Your cells are transparent to X-rays but not your skeleton and that’s how doctors can examine your bones. Walls are transparent to radio waves and wifi so that’s why you can listen to radio without needing an antenna outside your home and connect to the wifi from any room of your house. It happens that glass is transparent to visible light so we can see through.
Now, the reason why glass is transparent to visible light and walls are transparent to radio waves has to do with their atomic structure. It is kind of complicated for an Eli5 but it is a matter of interaction between atoms and light: if the atoms interact with a specific kind of light, it can’t get through unscathed so it is not transparent to that particular kind of light. If there is no interaction then the light just goes through and the result is transparency.
Disclaimer:
I am in no way qualified to answer but I thought I’d say something anyway so you’ll get my idea:
As far as I know if an object is see-through/ transparent is determined by whether light can pass through it or not.
Example: If you take a dense object like metal, no light will pass through it and therefore the object is not transparent at all.
If you take a thin piece of paper, a small amount of light can pass through, it’s not transparent yet though, but you can see if a light source is behind it. If you take glass however, much light can pass through, therefore you can see through. The complete opposite would be a mirror, where all light is reflected.
So in summary: Object properties concerning perception are related to their ability to reflect and absorb light. The less it can absorb and or reflect, the more transparent it gets.
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Glass is more accurately described as a super-cooled liquid, than a solid.
There are no internal grain boundaries in the glass, and so it looks flawless and transparent (like water.)
Glass has a crystalline structure – very ordered in a rough 3D grid.
Imagine a shallow tank of water with posts standing up in them, arranged in rows spaced about a foot apart. If you make a wave on one side, the wave will continue past the posts to the other side of the tank.
If you added more posts, so that it’s much more crowded, the wave will be dampened by the posts, and might not make it all the way through to the other side.
This is analogous to density’s affect on translucency.
There’s also an impact from the wave’s size (wavelength). You can dampen a wave in the tank by placing posts just at increments of the wavelength. So even though the post density is low, it’ll still block waves of that specific size.
we see light.
Transparency just means light can pass through object.
Say you shine a beam through an object, how much of the total light actually passes through is how “transparent” it seems to us.
For example: Super thin sheet of ice, glass, glass of water, and super thin wet clothing.
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