Glass
“It's all becoming clear to me now!”
“People who own glass houses should get dressed in the basement.”
“It’s a fun thing to chew on when broken.”
“It’s half full.”
“It’s half empty! People who say otherwise are half full of shit.”
Glass is unique among common solid substances. It is neither crystalline nor amorphous. Technically a super-cooled liquid, glass exists in solid form at room temperature only due to a loophole in the laws of quantum physics. The study of glass is undertaken by scientists known as "glassholes".
In 1767 physicist Ben Dover showed that just as electrons can be thought of as "holes" in a sea of anti-electrons, un-electrons are the inverse of holes: bumps which exclude anti-electrons but are not "holes" either. (Anti-electrons are now called positrons. Differentials ("rear end" gear boxes) rely on the transmission of positrons in order to maintain traction – positraction.) Glass windows were invented as an alternative to killing birds. Since skyscrapers, their success rate has grown enormously.
Unlike positrons, Eugenie Diract's "bumps" have not received a common name although Niels Bohr once sent her a fetching red lace brassiere. It is, however, the presence of these "bumps" which allow glass to solidify without crystallizing.
Despite its appearance of solidity glass can and does flow. Common window glass slumps gradually over time and the windowpanes in Grandma's house may be so irregular that they bend gravity waves and present a distorted view of the outside. In an elegant demonstration of the large-scale application of quantum physics, this gravitational distortion can in extreme cases force the observer's eyes to focus on the bridge of his own nose – the famous "Einstein cross" phenomenon seen in certain photographs taken by the Hubble space telescope.
In architectural applications, the use of glass should be considered carefully. For example, it is extremely important to use glass at a low level in child care centers, schools and the like.
Nowadays specialized plastics have replaced glass in many applications. LEDs use demon-proofed plastic rather than glass; fighter pilots are protected by plexiglas which, ironically, is not glass but a hardened plastic rolled onto their bodies before they put on their flight suits. And of course "glass" eyes are made of polyarsenide plastic which prevents the growth of fungus in the eye socket. Early attempts to use actual glass in prosthetic eyes caused dense growths of shiitakke and matsutake mushrooms to sprout from beneath the eyelids of the recipients, and poisonous amanitas sometimes sprouted from their tear ducts.
Volcanic glass is formed underground by the activity of microscopic black holes in the Earth's crust. It is coloured, and despite anti-segregation laws has been mostly excluded from employment in the windows industry.
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