Why glass is transparent ???

Put a piece of wood in front of your eyes are you able to see through it ??Maybe no, hold piece of plastic in front of you ,can you see through it ?? No.
Hold a piece of glass in front of you , you can through it ,thats different than others.But why ??

Ask anyone around you that why glass is transparent, they will simply say that because it don't absorb light and allow it to pass through it, which is right but why so ??Why don't it absorb light like other materials do ??


Have you wondered that something so solid can be so invisible ??
To understand this we need to understand that what glass is and where it comes from.It all began in earths crust where two most common elements are silicon and oxygen.These react together to form silicon dioxide whose molecules arrange themselves in crystal form called quartz.
Quartz are commonly found in sand and are main ingredients in types of glass.
When quartz are heated high enough the energy makes the molecules vibrate until they break the bonds holding them together and become a flowing liquid. During cooling these don't reforms as crystals.Instead,as molecules has lose energy they are less likely to move into an ordered position and thus become amorphous solid (a solid material with structure of liquid) which allow molecules to fill in any gaps.This makes surface of glass uniform allowing light to strike without scattering in different directions .

But our question is still pending that why glass allows light to pass through it without absorbing it like other solids??For that we need to see its atomic structure.We know that in an atom electrons revolve around nucleus but its interesting to know that it has mostly empty space so light can pass without any absorption. Then why not all materials are transparent?? as they are also made up of atoms with mostly empty space.All this depend upon different energy levels that electron in an atom can have.

Electrons absorb and release energy to jump from one energy level to another.
In any material,when light fall on it then the electrons inside it absorbs energy and jump to another level and they are not transparent but on the other hand in glass the gap between these energy level is far more large and the photon of visible light cant provide enough energy for an electron to jump,so they pass through and glass become transparent. Photons of UV light provides just the right amount of energy and are absorbed, that is why we cant get suntan through glass.

Due to these special properties of glass it is being used in many places from a long time.From window glasses to our eye glass, from lens in big telescopes to lens in microscopes they are being used everywhere .
It is really very difficult to imagine today's world without glass. And yet being such an important material we rarely think about it.

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