why is glass transparent but other things are not? As in, why can you see through glass but not say a wall?
In: Physics
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.
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