Did You Know? Glass Technically Is Not A Solid

This might come as a surprise, especially given how still and sturdy it appears.

What looks like a solid barrier is actually a mystery in motion.

It sits in your windowpane, cool and unmoving. You drink your morning orange juice from it. It gleams on your wristwatch, shields your smartphone, and makes chandeliers sparkle in the sunlight. But here’s the twist—glass, the everyday miracle, isn’t actually a solid. Not in the strictest scientific sense, anyway.

This might come as a surprise, especially given how still and sturdy it appears. But glass, fascinatingly, is more like a supercooled liquid—a state of matter that exists somewhere between liquid and solid. Imagine a material frozen in motion, molecules suspended in a kind of arrested development. That’s glass.

The story begins in the world of atoms. In a typical solid—say, a crystal—the atoms line up in perfect, repeating patterns. Think of it like soldiers on parade, every one in formation. But in glass? Picture a crowd at a music festival. They’ve stopped moving, more or less, but there’s no real order to it. The atoms are locked in place, yes, but jumbled, like a snapshot of chaos. That’s what gives glass its strange, dual nature.

Now, this doesn’t mean your living room windows are about to melt into a puddle. At room temperature, glass behaves very much like a solid. It’s just that, structurally, it’s different from other solids. It didn’t freeze in a neat crystalline form; instead, it cooled so quickly that its molecules never had time to organise themselves. It’s a bit like stopping a musical chairs game halfway through—no one’s where they “should” be, but they’re stuck there all the same.

There’s even a myth—repeated in old museums and pub trivia—that medieval stained-glass windows are thicker at the bottom because the glass has flowed downwards over the centuries. That’s poetic, but not quite true. The uneven thickness is more likely down to old production methods, not time travel.

Still, the idea of a substance that refuses to be pinned down is oddly poetic. In a world obsessed with definitions and neat boxes, glass is a quiet rebel. Neither fish nor fowl. Not liquid, not solid. Just… glass.

It makes you look again at the ordinary. That bottle of wine. The face of your clock. The tiny screen you’re reading this on. Each one is a little mystery, a frozen moment of molecular mayhem.

Next time you press your hand against a window, remember: you’re not touching a solid wall. You’re touching a moment caught in flux—an ancient river of sand, frozen mid-flow, quietly defying definition.