2004/02/26 BIG WARNING: These pages haven't been updated for years and years, and I've only recently remembered that they exist. I can't say that the pages that continue represent me at all, at the least, they do historically, so watch out. I don't even sound like what I think my previous self sounded like any more.
I've recently found something that I scribbled down in my papers whilst waiting for Raddy in BSC's Coffee Bean. This is an excerpt from an article by Robert Kunzig, "The Physics of... glass", in the October '99 issue of Discovery.
"An ideal glass, some theorists believe, is what you would produce if you could cool a liquid with geologic slowness while somehow preventing it from crystallizing. It would form at one precise temperature, just as solids, liquids, and gases do. Like them, it would be a distinct phase of matter, and not merely - like ordinary glass - a solid-liquid hybrid. An ideal glass would be as motionless and nearly as orderly as a crystal, but it would not be a crystal. No one knows what it would be like."
"You're asking me to engage in poetry," says Frank Stillinger of Bell Labs. "It's like saying, 'What color is the hair of angels dancing on the head of a pin?' I can't answer that question either."
Things have changed a lot since I last edited these pages, and I'm in (yet) another country once more. Next year it will be 10 years now that I've muddled around online, and maybe something will come out of it. Until then, though... :)
