The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

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BasicallyPure
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The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

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The Great Exploding Glass Mystery
A true story by BasicallyPure, 01/04/2016


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On the morning of January 4, 2016 I discovered that something very unusual had occurred in my home while I slept peacefully with my wife in my bed.
Neither myself nor my wife remember hearing any unusual noises during the night.
I had been up late the previous night working until about 2:00 AM on a computer program.
This is the same room where the incident occurred.

I awoke approximately 9:00 AM, got dressed, used bathroom, the usual stuff.
A short while later I went into the room where I had my workbench and computer setup.
I went in with the intention of turning on the computer in preparation to continue working on my program.
I was shocked to see that there was broken glass all over the floor, not just a little bit but lots of it scattered over a wide area.
My first thought was that the cats (we have two) had somehow broken something during the night.
I was really mystified for a while as to where the glass had come from or what it had been before it was broken.
I eventually identified the source of the glass.

At the end of my workbench tucked back under the bench top along the end I have a set of wooden drawers.
Located on top of the drawers I had placed two pieces of heavy flat glass panes for storage in an out of the way safe location.
These two glass panes I have had for many years and kept stored in this location.
They were originally removed from the front of old television sets that were probably built back in the 1950s.
The  glass panes were very thick and heavy, measuring about 17 inches by 22 inches.
There was only a very narrow gap between the glass and the bottom of the workbench.
I see no way that anything could have fallen and struck the glass.

Here is where the story gets really strange.
As I mentioned there were two pieces of glass stacked one on top of the other.
One of the pieces of glass was broken, completely shattered actually, and the other piece was intact and unharmed.
Guess which piece was broken, It was the one on the bottom of the stack, sandwiched between the upper piece of glass and the top of the drawers.
Judging from the pattern on the surrounding floor area the glass must have exploded outward radially from underneath the top piece.
A few of the pieces had actually been thrown entirely out of the room and were lying on the hallway carpet.
I would judge that approximately 50% of the bottom piece of glass was entirely thrown clear of it pre-explosion location.
The remaining bits were still trapped between the upper glass pane and the top of the drawers.

It took me more than an hour to clean up the mess.
I only managed to cut myself once before I put on a pair of gloves.
I noticed that there were no large pieces intact.
The largest were about the size of my hand and they were completely cracked through and would crumble easily with the slightest pressure.
A small amount of the glass that had been trapped under the upper intact piece was reduced nearly to a fine powder.
I picked up as many pieces as I could by hand and placed them inside an empty cereal box.
It was nearly full and very heavy when I was finished.
A thorough vacuum job took care of the rest of the cleanup.

So what could have caused this unusual happening?
I have only one weak hypothesis with no supporting evidence.

If the glass had somehow become strongly adhered to the top of the wooden drawer cabinet and if the wood were to expand or contract the resulting build-up of force might have caused the glass to shatter violently.
The problem is I have no explanation as to why the glass would stick that strongly to the wood.
During cleanup the broken pieces brushed away easily, there was no evidence they were stuck in any way.
The surface of the wood was dry and smooth without any unusual markings.
The wood had a polyurethane finish that was applied back in 1974 as a high school wood shop project.
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The proper authorities will be notified for further investigation.
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You know after you have considered all possibilities and you have ruled out everything including aliens...
It's still Aliens! It's always Aliens!


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I took the following pictures for further documentation of this incident.

Notice the top piece of glass still intact with the shattered glass underneath.
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All cleaned up and everything back in it's place.
The remaining glass pane sits peacefully atop the draws behind the chair where I work at my computer.
Should I be worried that I am sitting beside a ticking time-bomb and at some future time that innocent looking piece of glass will explode violently and decapitate me?
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normeus
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by normeus »

Gamma rays from CRT television mutated the glass.
I will show this post to my wife and in fear of our life will replace our 13 inch death ticking bomb CRT for an 80 inch life saving flat screen.

beware of mutant screens!

Norm.
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by heartbone »

normeus wrote:Gamma rays from CRT television mutated the glass.
I will show this post to my wife and in fear of our life will replace our 13 inch death ticking bomb CRT for an 80 inch life saving flat screen.

beware of mutant screens!

Norm.
If that were true then very many picture tubes would have spontaneously imploded over the years.

However your answer made me think about the Wigner effect on glass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqVkjqLSz80
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by Dude »

My guess is perhaps the cats jumped on top of the drawer, thus adding extra pressure on the glass underneath, which caused one to shatter and parts of it flying across the room to the hallway.
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by applePi »

innocent looking piece of glass will explode violently and decapitate me
may be it is the Spontaneous glass breakage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneo ... s_breakage
in fact it is the first time i know that glass can break by its own without any reason.
will read more about the subject
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by BasicallyPure »

Dude wrote:My guess is perhaps the cats jumped on top of the drawer, thus adding extra pressure on the glass underneath, which caused one to shatter and parts of it flying across the room to the hallway.
The cat hypothesis does not fit well with the evidence.
The top is pretty well protected by the workbench with about an inch of space between.
The small strip along the edge that was a little more exposed measures about 4 inches wide with about 6 inches headroom.
It may not be easy to see from picture #1 but there was quite a bit of dust on the top glass.
I could not see any evidence that the dust had been disturbed.
Further down in picture 6 you can see where I wiped some of the dust away with my glove along the left edge.

All the evidence I could see indicated there was a considerable amount of energy released in a very short time.
Much more than just simple breakage of the glass.

@applePi
thanks for the link. Interesting but none of the descriptions match very well with my incident I think.
The internal defects and inclusions of Nickel Sulfide description is probably the closest.
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by BasicallyPure »

A bit more research and the' internal defects and Nickel Sulfide inclusion' idea is starting to appear very plausible.
http://chicagowindowexpert.com/windowta ... red-glass/
There is a place in the article where they talk about 'Spontaneous breakage in tempered glass' and even exploding glass.
I think this has become much less of a mystery now.
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DontTalkToMe
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by DontTalkToMe »

heartbone wrote:
normeus wrote:Gamma rays from CRT television mutated the glass.
If that were true then very many picture tubes would have spontaneously imploded over the years.
I 'think' he was joking. :)

In any case CRT does not emit gamma rays, just low intensity X-rays.
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by blueb »

BasicallyPure... I may have solved this.

- I notice you haven't up-dated your profile picture lately
- You write fabulous code for the users of PureBasic
- This bizarre story

Are you 'The Most Interesting Man In The World'? :P

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- It was too lonely at the top.

System : PB 6.21(x64) and Win 11 Pro (x64)
Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X w/64 gigs Ram, AMD RX 6950 XT Graphics w/16gigs Mem
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BasicallyPure
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by BasicallyPure »

@blueb
:oops: Modesty prevents me from answering your question. :oops:

Using the great resource known as the internet I may have assembled a plausible explanation for this mystery.

I have learned that my glass may have had a temper and for some reason it became very angry.
Here is a quote from Wikipedia about “Toughened or tempered glass”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toughened_glass
Toughened or tempered glass is a type of safety glass processed by controlled thermal or chemical treatments to increase its strength compared with normal glass.
Tempering puts the outer surfaces into compression and the inner surfaces into tension.
Such stresses cause the glass, when broken, to crumble into small granular chunks instead of splintering into jagged shards as plate glass (aka: annealed glass) creates.

So there is potential energy built into the glass just sitting there for years and years waiting to be released.
All it needs is the proper trigger.

So here is another pair of quotes from this link. http://chicagowindowexpert.com/windowta ... red-glass/
Tempered Glass Breakage When tempered glass breaks, the energy retained in the glass due to internal tension/compression releases explosively and produces a glass breakage pattern sometimes called “cubes”.
Seeing a cubic breakage pattern does not tell you why the glass broke, it only tells you that the glass was tempered.
Generally, there are three reasons tempered glass will break: impact, edge damage or inclusions.
Inclusions are tiny impurities in the glass. The most well known are nickel sulfide, however there are also ferrous, silica and gaseous inclusions which look like tiny bubbles.
Spontaneous Breakage in Tempered Glass: Glass, and especially tempered glass, sometimes breaks all by itself.
This can be quite disconcerting when, as has happened in a public place which will go unnamed here in our great city, large, thick panes of tempered glass basically blew up fairly frequently.
The unusual cause in this rare instance: the glazing contractor attempted to grind the edges of the glass after it was tempered, creating a series of time bombs.
- See more at: http://chicagowindowexpert.com/windowta ... PqOsD.dpuf
A more well-known, but also quite rare cause of spontaneous glass breakage is nickel sulfide inclusions.
If you read the previous post, you will already be down with the fact that glass is made from melted powders.
A nickel sulfide inclusion is a tiny rock of material that remains in the glass.
You can well imagine that a little rock embedded in a slab of glass which is under high tension/compression forces, could weaken the glass and eventually cause glass breakage.
But the story gets worse.
Nickel sulfide grows an additional 4% of its size over time.
If it is located in the strata in the glass between tension and compression, and it grows, kaboom!
So now we have two plausible explanations.
The one described above and let’s not forget aliens.
I’m still not ruling out aliens, I’ve seen the YouTube documentaries!
BasicallyPure
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by Zebuddi123 »

From Todays DailyMail another X-Files case lol
Zebuddi. :)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... hards.html
malleo, caput, bang. Ego, comprehendunt in tempore
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by netmaestro »

The fact that the shards weren't sticky doesn't mean that sticking to the wood wasn't responsible, it would only take being stuck in a minimum of two spots for the explosion to occur. Temp changes could also do it to the bottom pane only because it's the one sandwiched and unable to expand/contract easily like the one above it
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by BasicallyPure »

I would have thought there would be some kind of mark or stain on the wood if it really was stuck that well.

I now think the spontaneous breakage due to nickel sulfide inclusions is a real possibility.
As research has shown it may be a rare occurrence but not totally unheard of.

The fact that tempered glass holds a lot of potential energy explains why the glass flew as far as it did.
Because it was confined above and below the only way it could go was outward in the horizontal directions.

The thing I find really surprising is that that piece of glass was 60 or 70 years old!
Talk about time bomb with a slow fuse!
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by Num3 »

You don't need much pressure to explode a piece of glass, even a grade of sand can shatter it, if it has enough fine edges on it's surface!

Take a look : https://youtu.be/llu-ckEe5cQ?t=385 ( Protective eye wear recommended!!! :twisted: )
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Re: The Great Exploding Glass Mystery

Post by yoxola »

In some situations, if the grass is under some pressure, it may crack/shatter like this, it's involved with the structure of glass and it may happen to
ceramics as well.

Some new tampered glass have new mechanisms and a thin layer of protection material to prevent this happen.
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