does gravity have any effect on glass?

Question

i.e. in the vertical position does it get thicker at the base over time?

Answer 1

Yes, gravity works on anything with mass and glass will sag over time. The higher the temperature, the faster the sag.

Answer 2

No, no, no. That whole thing about windows being thicker at the bottom is because the glass was made that way. People were smart enough to make it thicker at the bottom for stability purposes. It has been proven that diffusion in glass is much too slow to have any effect over the time span that humans have been making glass.

And yungw above me is very wrong. Water does not hold everything together.

Answer 3

Yes. Glass is actually a viscous liquid and over time gravity will make the base thicker and the top thinner.

Answer 4

Yes it flows under the influence of gravity. Hence old glass will be thicker at the bottom than the top.

Answer 5

Yes. Glass is not a solid. If you look at the windows in old houses the panes of glass are thicker at the bottom than at the top.

Answer 6

Oh yes. Glass is more or a less a liquid and will drip over several years. If you look at a house that is a century old, including the windows, you will see tear drops formed on the glass. It takes a long, long time though.

Answer 7

I am a bit surprised at the variety of answers here. If you go to the Corning Glass Museum in Corning, NY, with its wonderful variety of historical and technological displays, you will find that they say, categorically and clearly, without a shadow of a doubt, that: GLASS IS A LIQUID.

And nobody, nobody, knows more about glass than Corning.

By the way, it is true that in old buildings you can see the glass actually has horizontal ripples in it. It is flowing downward, albeit slowly.

Answer 8

Yes, glass flows VERY VERY slowly. In very old church windows (maybe not in america, because it takes many hundreds of years), when they are taken down to be cleaned or something, the glass is noticeably thicker at the bottom.

Answer 9

No.

Glass is an amorphous solid. It does not flow at normal temperatures. It doesn't flow very slowly; it doesn't flow at all.

Glass does not have the rigid crystalline structure of most solids, which gives rise to the popular misconception that it is not a solid.

The bottom thickness of old glass is due to the manufacturing methods.

Answer 10

yes and so does everything else on earth. if it didnt have some water in it it would poof vanish into thin air with the slightest of touches, much like very cold items that shatter when touched, because the water molecules are nearly standing still and losing their friction which was enabling them to hold together what was there in the first place. yes even very dry sand in the middle of the sahara or any other destert has water holding it together.