![Display of Vitreous World exhibit](https://utsic.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/The-Vitreous-World-Sign-and-Display-1024x683.jpg)
We are surrounded by glass. Our industrialized world produces it in enormous quantities and innumerable varieties. Its most common properties—hardness, chemical inertness, a capacity to transmit light, or to form smooth, flat surfaces—make it suitable for many tasks. A scientist or engineer might describe glass as an amorphous solid consisting primarily of silica in combination with other materials, whose nature and proportion determine the properties of a particular glass…