Clear as Air

Scientists have long known that glass consists of about 46% oxygen by weight but it remained for scientific study to explain how it was spread out through the transparent substance. Dr. Alexis Pincus of American Optical Co. last week announced, as a result of new X-ray studies of the atomic structure of glass, that 92% of its volume consists of nothing but oxygen caught in the interstices of a relatively scanty framework made of silicon and other elements.

Still more significant was his new theory of the nature of that framework. When molten glass is allowed to cool slowly enough to crystallize, it loses its transparency. Cooled more rapidly, it remains clear. So science has assumed that it is amorphous, a patternless collection of molecules, constituting a sort of stiffened liquid. In fact the classic definition of glass is "a liquid whose rigidity is great enough to enable it to be put to certain useful purposes." Dr. Pincus believes that the structure of glass is neither amorphous nor crystalline but somewhere between, with its atoms symmetrically arranged in patterns.

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