Taking miracles for granted
Miracles are all around us every day, yet
we take them only as our due.
Consider glass. What would our lives be like without this miraculous
stuff? It’s everywhere and it’s
essential to the quality of our lives. It’s
made by melting simple sand, one of the most abundant materials on our planet,
yet it’s incredibly durable, it can withstand extreme temperatures while
remaining dimensionally stable, and, fantastically, we can see through it as though it were not even there.
Nobody seems to know how long glass has
been around, but there’s a 5,000-year-old example in a British museum. The Indians didn’t have glass in their abodes
when the Pilgrims arrived in America wearing too many clothes, but Virginia
settlers built a glass factory in the early 1600s and started putting rippled
windows in their buildings. Many of
those windows still survive and serve.
Without glass our homes would be dark
boxes. It lets in natural light and
gives us expansive views while serving as a barrier to the elements. Without glass, vehicles as we know them would
never have been built, Edison would never have been able to invent the light
bulb, and we would not have developed clear mirrors that let us see ourselves
as others do. Because of its miraculous
optical qualities—its ability to bend light—glass can be fashioned into prisms
that spread light into its colorful spectrum, and it can be made into lenses
that help near- or far-sighted people see with great resolution. It gives us cameras that allow us to faithfully
capture still and moving images. It can
be crafted into precision mirrors and lenses that bring distant objects close
through binoculars, and that even let us peer far out across deep time into the
vastness of the Universe through telescopes.
Glass is only one among many daily
miracles that greatly enrich our lives, but I think it deserves special recognition.
I propose a National Glass Day on which we
should all raise a glass in toast to this magical material.
Phil
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