Corning witnesses Gorilla Glass shrinking, perhaps proving glass is actually a liquid

It’s a common urban legend that, technically speaking, glass flows like a liquid. You might’ve even learned this “fact” in school. Unfortunately for romantic chemists, technically speaking, the myth isn’t true. However, Corning, makers of the Gorilla Glass that protects our smartphones and tablets, has witnessed a sheet of the famed strong glass shrinking, which means the glass is actually flowing in some respect.

The urban legend about glass flowing is said to have came to exist because the glass toward the bottom of an old stained glass window was thicker than toward the top. Why, the question goes, would the builder have made the windows in such a way, rather than with uniform thickness throughout? Clearly, glass must flow, and due to gravity, the glass flowed to the bottom of the stained glass window over time. In actual fact, the extra thickness at the bottom is probably due to the production process, which resulted in uneven sheets of glass. Chemically, glass and liquids are very different too: Whereas the molecules in liquid aren’t bonded together and can thus move freely, the atoms in glass are chemically bonded together, and stay put.

Despite the urban legend being thoroughly debunked, though, Corning recently announced that a one-square-meter sheet of Gorilla Glass shrank five micrometers over the course of 10 days, showing that glass does in fact move.

The Gorilla Glass sheet actually kept shrinking, but at a staggeringly slower rate. While the initial shrinkage was minuscule to begin with — five micrometers in 10 days — the sheet subsequently shrank another five micrometers after 18 months.

There’s a catch, though. Gorilla Glass — as we all know — isn’t like regular glass. In order to toughen up the glass, potassium and sodium atoms are added when the glass is being made. Basically, after the glass is made, these atoms move around the object until they finally settle into comfy spots. With the atoms now snugly settled instead of swimming around, the glass shrinks a little bit.

You don’t have to worry about your smartphones and tablets — 10 micrometers over the course of a couple of years isn’t enough to cause a problem for your device.

As it turns out, this shrinking of Gorilla Glass is the first kind of observation of this kind of movement in glass, even if it was observed in specially treated glass. As for what it means for Gorilla Glass, or more importantly your smartphone, it doesn’t seem to mean much at the moment other than the myth about glass may not be a myth after all. That is, if you’re talking about treated glass under a specific circumstance.