Читать книгу Amorphous Nanomaterials - Lin Guo - Страница 17

The use of natural amorphous materials can be traced back to prehistoric times when Obsidian was used as a cutting tool. It was a kind of natural glass, formed by the sudden cooling of magma from volcanic lava. With a sharp fracture surface, people used it for cutting as knives.

Because of the simplicity of preparation, glass has become the first amorphous material to be prepared on a large scale. The history of glass preparation can be traced back to the ancient Babylonians and Greeks 5000 years ago, but it was not until the twelfth century that glass began to be manufactured in batches as an industrial material. Subsequently, the large-scale preparation of transparent glass rapidly promoted the development of science and technology at that time. For example, Galileo Galilei’s home-made telescope discovered the uneven surface of the moon in 1609, refuted Aristotle’s theory of perfect celestial bodies, and opened the curtain of modern astronomy; Isaac Newton observed the dispersion of light with a prism in 1666. A year later in 1676, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the father of the microscope, reported observations of red blood cells and microbes, which laid the foundation of modern bacteriology and protozoology in biology. This transparent, stable, and processable material provided fully technical support for the development in many disciplines.