Glass is an integral piece to many parts of our modern lives—it is in our smartphones, high-speed fiber optic cables, windows, and so on. And though, we are surrounded by glass in our everyday lives, scientists remain puzzled by the material and why it forms the way it does. Silica is the type of glass you are probably most familiar with, but there are many more types of glass beyond silica. Glass is mysterious, in that it is technically any rigid amorphous solid, which means its atoms and molecules are not arranged in an orderly structure but instead exist in whatever random arrangement they happen to be in when the material cooled and solidified. Decades ago, researchers came up with an idea: If glass could still flow and settle, then maybe it could reach a hypothetical ideal state where the randomly flowing molecules happened to arrange themselves as dense and orderly as possible. This “ideal glass” could explain why glass is a liquid with molecules that can’t flow. Researchers are determined to find this ideal form of glass, but it might not be attainable.
