Just what do you think if you wake up to see the inside pane of a double glazed sliding door shattered, knowing that nobody inside your home hit it from the inside? That’s exactly what happened to Alan Graham and he wants answers to save his sanity – I would too. My own personal theory would be whatever inert gas was used to fill the glazed cavity reacted badly to the temperature changes and blew out the weaker of the two panes. Although I’m sure there are many other explanations… via: Boing Boing
I saw a similar thing happen to a large tempered storefront window. It was caused by the building foundation settling and trying to change the frame shape from a rectangle to a parallelogram. Tempering makes it shatter into tiny pieces like that.
That’s true about the tempering alright. I remember hearing once, perhaps an urban myth, that if you grind up the ceramic material surrounding an electrical fuse and throw it at tempered glass it will hit the resonant frequency of the glass and shatter it. Sounds unbelieveable and probably is but I’d like to rule out resonant frequencies as a potential cause of this event.