Continuation Sheet: Fill & Download for Free

In 1969 Stuart Dockerty was awarded US patent #3,467,513 (assigned to Corning) for a process called fusion glass. The method produced a continuous sheet of glass that was flawless on both sides, but at the time nobody needed that kind of perfection. The float method was vastly cheaper and made very nice, really flat windows just fine thank you. Corning dumped a reputed $50 million into the process before abandoning it in the 80s. The invention languished and patents expired before the rise of large liquid crystal displays (LCD) in the mid 90s. As fate would have it you can’t make a LCD unless you can make glass that is absolutely perfect on both sides. And guess who had “the” way to make that glass—in most any size you wanted, in a continuous fashion that could meet demand for literally billions and billions of pieces? Some say it saved Corning glassworks. That's likely. What it certainly did was enable the smartphone, tablet, and 80″ TV, not to mention all the technologies those gadgets have driven. The glassmaking technology developed in the 60s didn't have a use for 30 years and without it, our present world would be a markedly different place.

No.“Gold is so malleable that a single ounce of it (about the size of a quarter) can be beaten into a thin continuous sheet measuring roughly 100 square feet. That means it would take 576 ounces (or just 36 pounds) of gold to completely cover a football field, or a whopping 367,211 ounces (or about 11 tons) of gold to completely blanket all of Central Park”American Museum of Natural History

This is what a black hole looks like: (source: holofractal.net)Now, Einstein came along and changed all the views that people had about space and time. The old beliefs were that space and time were independent of each other and space was just a medium in which all the galaxies existed and was not involved in any occurrence in the universe.But Einstein proved that space and time were inextricably entangled in a continuous sheet called spacetime, and that they were dependent on each other. Basically, he stated that as space stretches, time stretches too, hard though it is to believe. When space and time get stretched due to gravity, it is called Gravitational Time Dilation. The more gravity an object has (say, a black hole), the more space and time get stretched relative to an object with less gravity. (you can imagine a ball placed on a sheet. The ball forms a kind of depression, stretching the sheet)A black hole's gravity stretches the sheet of spacetime to such a great extent that space and time get stretched terrifically. If you have seen Interstellar, when the two protagonists Cooper and Amelia Brand were travelling around the black hole Gargantua, Cooper said that the maneuver would cost them fifty-one years. What he meant was that while they travelled around Gargantua (which would probably take them just about an hour or even less), fifty-one years would pass back on Earth due to the spacetime getting stretched near the black hole.