And now, the recipe for the room-temperature glass layer…... although unfortunately, you probably won’t get very far with it. The reason I haven’t shared the recipe until now is because I wanted to keep the Nobel Prize all to myself. NO. It’s because I spent the last two weeks trying to eliminate one component from the equation — a component that is almost certainly not something the average modern household has lying around. But now I’m going on vacation 🏝️, and obviously I’m not taking my labs with me. I’m not going to continue the experiments, I won’t be posting either, so it’s going to look as if I’ve simply disappeared. “Look, the guy tricked us and then disappeared without a trace!” Well, no. The result is real, the recipe is simple — you just probably won’t have the starting material you need. And despite struggling with this for two weeks, I couldn’t find a substitute for it. But maybe you will! 👍🏻 So I’m sharing the recipe as I currently know it, exactly as it is, in case someone can take it further while I’m sitting on a beach getting a tan. All I ask is that if someone manages to completely solve this mystery while I’m away, please consider a shared Nobel Prize! 🤪 So, the “secret ingredient” is none other than old, completely whitened, end-of-life waterglass. Yep. The stone shown in the video is proof that the glass layer is actually a precipitation. The layer is present on one side of the stone, but completely absent on the other side, even though the stone was standing vertically in the solution. Don’t let the visibly rough condition of the glass layer fool you — this was the first one, and I subjected it to all kinds of tests - too early. The important thing is that there is glass on one side, and ABSOLUTELY NONE on the other, even though the stone was standing vertically in the solution! So this isn’t the bottom and the top of the stone. It’s the right and left sides. Yeah. The glass is indeed a preipitated layer. So let me explain in detail what I did the first time I got this result. This stone was cast in that sour cream container (so it is an artificial one), and then I cut it in half with an angle grinder because I wanted to see what was inside. The inside was quite crumbly, so I decided to strengthen it. I soaked it in this, then that, then something else, impregnated it with one thing and then another, thinking that eventually it would become stronger. And while doing all this, I dipped the stone into all kinds of things. Ash lye, wine, waterglass, God knows what else. At this point, it doesn’t really matter. The funny thing is that now, having reconstructed what actually happened, I wasn’t trying to create a glass layer at all. I was simply trying to strengthen a crumbly stone. But there wasn’t enough waterglass in the lab to completely cover the stone standing in the container. Fill up with water? Nooo! I didn’t want to dilute it with water, so I started looking around in the cupboard and found a bottle of waterglass that was more than a year old and had already turned completely white. I poured this waterglass into the container on ONE SIDE of the stone. And I really mean one side. I did NOT mix it. I thought the waterglass will be "smart enough" to mix its old self with its new self. But the old one didn’t flow around to the other side. It simply accumulated against this curved surface of the stone and deposited there. The best evidence that this is exactly what happened is that even toward the edge of the curved section, the layer wasn’t nearly as thick as it was where I actually poured the old waterglass. And on the cut side of the stone, where I DID NOT pour any old waterglass, absolutely nothing was deposited. And this old waterglass is the thing you probably don’t have at home. Because modern people simply throw this stuff away. “It’s gone bad. Into the trash.” I spent the last couple of weeks trying to find an alternative solution that doesn’t require this old waterglass. Exactly so that I could start public beta testing. I didn’t want to release a recipe that would require you to wait an entire year to have one of the ingredients before you could even start experimenting with it. So I tried artificially aging the waterglass using all sorts of methods — baking soda, acids, slaked lime, carbon dioxide — but none of them produced suspended particles in the waterglass. So far, only waiting did. I did, however, lose a SodaStream machine in the process. RIP. 🪦 So, for now, the answer seems to be: either wait a year, or find some old waterglass in your cupboard. I haven’t found another way. Over the past few weeks, a few people volunteered to beta-test the process. But I only chose people who have been working with me for a long time, so there was at least a chance that they might have some old waterglass, or artificial stone, or both, at home. Mondo Mondo in Australia actually did the experiment, and it worked. I don’t know the Canadian guy, Odhinn , so I have absolutely no idea how he did it. Mondo’s waterglass wasn’t completely white, but it was thicker than normal — 46% from the shop — and it was at least six months old. Bingo. The experiment worked for him. What’s interesting is that once I finally identified the old waterglass as the responsible component, I tried using it directly — just soaking stones in the old waterglass by itself. And that didn’t work 😵 The important thing is (?) the mixture and ratio of fresh and old waterglass. Something like two-thirds fresh waterglass and one-third completely whitened, old waterglass. The explanation may be the following — and this isn’t me saying it, it's Mr. Grok: "The old waterglass provides the amorphous silica nuclei that are essential for the precipitation, while the fresh waterglass provides the chemical activity and high pH that keep the whole process going." Okay! There’s one more thing I need to add. I was only able to create really thick precipitated layers on artificial stones. All the other thick layers, such as the ones on granite or eggshell, were not precipitation. Those were simply the thickened sludge that had formed, which I then smeared onto the surface. Because when an artificial stone is dipped into the magical mixture, it somehow thickens the entire mixture. Even in the last experiment, when I thought the egg was responsible for thickening the magical mixture, there was actually a small piece of artificial stone sitting in the corner of the container. From there, suspicious brownish streams were spreading in every direction. In other words, the artificial stone was releasing something that caused the entire mixture to turn into a gel. So, that’s where we are right now. Feel free to experiment. As far as I know, apart from the half-dead waterglass, I haven’t found another method that works. And now, my flight is about to leave. ✈️show more
