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A comment on To make the perfect mirror, physicists confront the mystery of glass.

Re:To make the perfect mirror, physicists confront the myste... by ebg13 on Friday April 03, 2020 @01:43PM (#22772048)
If the ideal state is perfectly flat and the proposed mechanism is to place individual atoms one at a time, why are they still talking about glass and not crystal lattice sheets?

> ideal glass are theoretically packed together in the densest possible random arrangement

Why would you want it to be random at all?

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Re:To make the perfect mirror, physicists confront the myste... by VorticesRcool on Friday April 03, 2020 @03:05PM (#22772915)
You would like it to have a lot of entropy. It's not about being random in the sense if being up to chance, it's about making the interactions between the electrons so complicated that any passing photon does not get absorbed or does not produce stimulated emission.

When there is enough entropy/complexity/randomness the electrons have no state that they can jump to of a similar range of energy to the frequencies of light that you would like the glass to be transparent to.

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