Glass

Glass is a non-crystalline amorphous solid that is often transparent and has widespread practical, technological, and decorative usage in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optoelectronics.

A jar made of soda-lime glass. Although transparent in thin sections, the glass is greenish-blue in thick sections from impurities. Bubbles remained trapped in the glass as it cooled from a liquid, through the glass transition, becoming a non-crystalline solid.

Quotes

• By means of [the microscope and the telescope] man touched, one might say, the two infinities. With the aid of glass, he could contemplate at his leisure the mite and the ring of Saturn. […] Master of glass through fire, and master of light through glass, he had lenses and mirrors of all kinds, prisms, containers, beakers, tubes, and finally barometers and thermometers. However all this originally began with the astronomical lens, which honours glass; and physics is born in some manner from astronomy, as it was written that, even in a material and gross sense, all science must descend from heaven.
  • Joseph de Maistre, An Examination of the Philosophy of Francis Bacon (1836), p. 47

• The ancient glass making techniques which originated on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean before the advent of Islam, incorporated practices from Roman techniques found in Syria, and Egyptian techniques dating back to 1555 B.C.
  • Maya Shatzmiller (31 December 1993). Labour in the Medieval Islamic World. BRILL. p. 225. ISBN 90-04-09896-8.