Why a broken glass cannot be reunited again?

Question

Why a broken glass cannot be reunited again?
I've heard there's some physics laws that will be violated
if this happens. So it cannot happen. Could you please
explain me why????

Answer 1

As always, there is some real physics at work here. Most stuff, glass, metal, you and me, are held together by van der Waals forces. These are forces caused by asymmetry in molecules. Even though these forces are strong enough to hold things together, they are very short range. If the molecules are separated by even a tiny amount, the forces are too weak to hold things together. If you can get stuff close enough together again it will weld back together. This happens with high precision surfaces especially in vacuum chambers where you actually need to be careful that things won't weld together on contact.

As far as broken glass, there is air, dust, chips of glass, etc. that interferes with the very, very close contact needed for the material to reattach. For what it's worth, even glue works using van der Waals forces, it smears over the surface making good enough contact for the forces to help hold stuff together.

Answer 2

I think you don't need any physics explanations for this...
Its simple... glass is solid and when some solid particle breaks it can only be reunited using some other stuff like glue... but reuniting them without anything is impossible... Is is the law of Nature and we have accept it..... ^_^

Answer 3

Broken glass can be reunited again, but it has to be melted and reformed and pretty much made again

Answer 4

The pieces of glass can be melted together and recast into a new glass.

Answer 5

It's called 'entropy' and it's a measurement of how 'ordered' a system is. The laws of thermodynamics operate so that entropy (randomness) is always increasing. It's a lot of stuff to try and get into here.

HTH ☺

Doug

Answer 6

glass has very tiny particles in it, so as the glass breaks the tiny particles spread out and the glass cannot be joined together.

Answer 7

glass is made up on silica corbonates and sodium carbonates and they are joined by overcoming there valency eg silica has vacant d orbital and it uses that for joining but if you break it then there polymeric chain get's broken and it is difficult to join them.