Saturday, June 1, 2013

Glass vs. Cold/Hot Water

If you're not already aware, it's important to be careful with glass dishes when dealing with a mix of hot and cold water.  You can easily crack the glass if you're not careful.  My wife and I made this unfortunate mistake the other night with a drinking glass.  We warmed up water in the glass in the microwave.  For some reason, we then dumped the hot water and put cold water in the glass.  The glass almost immediately cracked as you can see below.


So what's going on here?  Glass, like most substances, expands and contracts when heated or cooled.  Glass expands when hot and contracts when cool.  You can't see the contraction taking place, but it does.  If the temperature change of the glass is too extreme over too short of a time period, the glass will crack/break.

This is an important lesson to teach your kids as broken glass is very dangerous.  

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