Is There Anything More Transparent Than Glass?
There are several known substances that are more transparent than glass. The best-known are transparent acrylics, used from geodesic domes to windows at a hockey game used to prevent fans from getting nailed by the puck. ETFE (ethyl tetra fluoro ethylene), and PMME (polymethyl methacrylate), and Plexiglas are all significantly more transparent than glass. They are also more chemically more resistant, and can be more than a foot thick and transmit all light passing through. Because of tiny imperfections in atomic arrangement, and physical limits, nothing is perfectly transparent except a perfect vacuum, but some materials sure seem to come close. Pure quartz crystal is another material more transparent than glass. To understand how something can be more transparent than glass, you have to understand what causes transparency to begin with. Typically, it’s randomness in the molecular arrangement, but the chemical nature of the material also matters. Randomly oriented molecules, like those
