Glass engineering - designing and making photochromic glass

The awesome youtube channel Applied Science put out a 40 minute intro video to melting your own glass a week or two ago, going into the equipment, chemistry and recipies: [VIDEO] In particular, he talks about making your own photochromic glass that changes color in response to light. I'd highly recommend his channel to anyone interested in science and fabrication.

This was really interesting -- not a process I've ever realy thought about. You might enjoy this, Ben Krasnow talking about the challenges of making photochromic glass: [VIDEO]

I'm not a physicist or even a researcher of anything but I sometimes watch youtube videos of people experimenting with material sciences and chemistry and a trend I have seen is that even things that we consider to be very basic have a huge lack of good quality information available. One youtuber I saw spends time looking at new research papers for ideas and has found that they are just impossible to reproduce. Following the steps exactly as well as every possible variation doesn't produce anything close to the results described in the paper. In another video [0] he attempts to make glass and finds that almost all of the information available on the internet about making glass is not enough to actually make glass since they contain only enough information to register a patent but not enough to make from scratch. I wonder if we will see huge gains by just making complete and unobfiscated information available to the public since it looks like even the foundations of society are secret company internal information. [0] [VIDEO]

Agreed! Aside from the spurious results produced by publication bias, the amount of effort spent on trying things that somebody already knows don't work is staggering. The knowledge of what doesn't work is mostly passed on tacitly through apprenticeship rather than published, which means it can easily be lost. As a simple example, we've known how to make transparent glass for 1900 years, but it took Ben Krasnow two months to achieve it himself despite having money, libraries, and glass experts at his disposal, and being generally competent at making things, having built, for example, his own electron microscope: [VIDEO]