physics help: do any one knows why glass are transparent - Help.com

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wow ok well there is the obvious reason why its transparent….. but your looking for a reason in mathematics

well H[psi]=E[psi] is basically your schodinger wave equation. or you can see it as an eigen value equation where the hamiltonian acts on your states wave function to give the energy E.

of using boundary conditions to do this hmmmm

this question sounds very quantum mechanical in nature….. so let me think……

well i guess you could see the galss as a square well and the wave function as a plane wave. then you could apply the boundary conditions of your square well on the plane wave…… and show that the visible energy spectrum has sufficently high energy to pass over the well…. that would show transmition……………

but the problem of how to define the well potential and what is its magnitude…..

thats how you could do it on a very complex quantum mechanical level……

i cant think of how else to make use of the info you gave

it would help to know where this question comes from. ie what course and what you have been doing in class recently…..

becasue there are many ways to do it….. im just guessing you want a quantumk mechanical way

Glass is transparent as it has a real refractive index. Reflective things have complex refractive indices. Is that any use?

I think you are all reading in to this to much. I think I said that right, lol.
Anyway, the reason why glass is transparent is, so we can see through it.

i think he means in a quantum way and ben

how you

ben_j_richard wrote:

well i guess you could see the galss as a square well and the wave function as a plane wave. then you could apply the boundary conditions of your square well on the plane wave…… and show that the visible energy spectrum has sufficently high energy to pass over the well…. that would show transmition……………

but the problem of how to define the well potential and what is its magnitude…..

how you can apply “the boundary conditions of your square well on the plane wave”

???

well what you do is you define your plane wave inside free space and inside the barrier. you then have to link these waves so they are continuous across the boundaries. you do this by setting the wave equations and their derivatives equal at the boundaries. this gives you a set of equations that link the coefficents of transmission and reflection of the wave and how it behaves inside and outside the boundary.

i see that is good … :)

you need a super computer to solve this …