Good point, acutally once we have spray-on glass for, say, computers or floors, where does it end? Apply it to, say Pandas in chinese zoos to prevent them from getting sick? Sure. Spray it on your child to protect it from UV rays. Much cheaper than sunscreen. Not to mention potential for development. Someone mentioned reflective, but what if they decided to produce in in various colors? Kid runs at you with a spray can and for the remainder of the year you're covered in pink indestructium.


Though I actually think that breathing this stuff would be ok. Considering it's not, in fact, actual pieces of glass, but individual molecules...
Glass isn't poisonous, after all, just shreds your lungs. And I'm hoping the molecules won't do that.
Though personally, I'm not going to try that.

True, but the concept is still weird as hell.

What happens when the plants die? I'd assume farmers wouldn't be able to mulch the remains or let them sit and become fertilizer, for risk of the chemical seeping into the soil and groundwater... They can't feed the plants to livestock... What exactly do you do with glass-coated plants?

Mauve, it's glass. There's no leeching or other toxic issues any more than with, say, wax.

True. That was a stupid choice of wording on my part. But my point was that spraying this on plants would limit what you can do with the plants, unless it's somehow biodigradable. Even if it is just glass, you can't just let it sit in a field that raises crops.

I don't see why not. Silicon comes from the ground, so it's not likely to do any harm going back.

Edit: To put it this way, glass is pretty much as safe as it gets. It doesn't hurt you if you swallow a marble, so it wouldn't be likely to hurt anyone eating glassed corn. Worst case scenario, it gets into the soil and starts re-forming into sand.

Glassake
 

best quote out of context


Thread over.

I'm guessing by Quantum Effects they mean Van Der Waals forces. Its the only force at that level that could really work universally for all surfaces. Basically the outer shell electrons of one of the materials pushes away the outer shell electrons of the other material slightly. This causes a slightly more positive area and a slightly more negative area to develop creating a dipole out of both materials. The dipoles then attract. This arrangement is not actually stable and the electrons clouds will sort of slosh around but the net attraction remains from the induced dipoles remain. Its how Geckos stick to glass. I mean technically Van Der Waals forces are on the quantum scale and has to do with orbitals but the actual mechanics of the forces themselves are purely classical electrodynamics. Calling them Quantum effects just seems to be stereotypical hype.

Other than that the spray can probably do what they say it can. Chemistry labs use glassware specifically because it has a lot of those properties. Biolabs will also on occasion stick with glass petri dishes because it helps keep colonies where they are supposed to be growing. As for UV it depends on what type of impurities they can work into it really. The right combination of slight metallic impurities could give you something quite resistant to UV penetration. Aside from that it could also inhibit the chemical pathways needed for photodegradation but I don't know enough about that to comment. It certainly would be fun to play with.

Sith, as much as I loved your post... I still don't get it.
I mean, I'm sure a lot of us understand the whole "geckos stick to glass because they have REALLY small 1 way velcro on their hands" thing, but how exactly does it go from topical spray to velcro?

If I grasped the wikipedia article correctly, it's:
1: Electrons are randomly distributed throughout an atom
2: Thus, the charge of an atom at different points of said atom varies. (One side is more positive, the other is more negative)
3: Causes faint attraction between this atom and other atoms close to it

Is that the basic premise? I'm don't know much about physical chemistry.

The Velcro on Geckos isn't one way really. The little hairs on their feet are just shaped in such a way that when you pull down they get close enough to stick via Van Der Waals forces. The hairs are sorta curved up at the end so pulling down sort of pulls more and more across the surface like a broom. Pulling up on the other hand peels of one row of hair at a time. The force is only really strong when you have millions of hairs working together so peeling off one row is easy but moving all the hairs across the surface is almost impossible.

As for how it goes from spray to Velcro that is simple. Van Der Waals forces are everywhere and are always active. The problem generally is that the dipole attractive force falls of as something like 1/r^6 where as things like gravity and more traditional electrostatics forces fall of as 1/r^2. It has to do with the fact that the farther you get from a dipole the closer its two poles seem to get which makes it look more and more like no charge at all. Basically you have to get super close and even then its very weak. Geckos have hairs with quite literally microscopic ends and lots of them. These ends are so small they can get into all the nooks and crannies, we're talking nanoscopic variations in the surface, allowing them to basically touch most of the atoms of whatever they are walking on. By contrast our skin and basically every surface is so rough that the bumps keep us above most of the atoms in anything we touch preventing any significant Van Der Waals forces. Now with any ultra thin film you tend to get something that is super flexible which means like the Gecko hair it can settle into all those nanoscopic surface variations. In fact the film actually does a better job because its one continuous surface.

Its not really solely the domain of physical chemistry. Any material scientist from basically any background should know all about Van Der Waals forces. You also pick up a bit about it in standard Electricity and Magnetism in terms of calculating dipole-dipole interactions. In terms of chemistry probably the most interesting thing I know of that Van Der Waals forces do is cause the noble gases to form solids at very low temperature. Strictly speaking the noble gases can't form either covalent or ionic bonds with each other, without some seriously strange conditions. Instead once they get really really cold the Van Der Waals forces get strong enough to bind the gas together into a solid.