Final answer:
When a baseball breaks a car window, it involves physical properties like material hardness and brittleness, energy transfer, and mechanical behaviors consistent with Newton's third law of motion, resulting in the shattering of the window without a chemical change.
Step-by-step explanation:
When a baseball hits and breaks a car window, several properties come into play. Firstly, the impact demonstrates the properties of the materials involved—the hardness of the baseball and the brittleness of the glass. The force exerted by the baseball onto the window must exceed the material's breaking strength for the glass to shatter. The incident also illustrates the principles of energy transfer and Newton's third law of motion, which states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. As the baseball collides with the glass, the kinetic energy of the ball transforms into the energy needed to break the bonds in the glass, leading to the creation of many pieces of glass but no chemical change.
Furthermore, the ability of an object to withstand impact without breaking, known as toughness, is an important property to consider. For instance, if the same window was made from tempered glass, it would have a higher toughness and potentially could resist breaking under similar conditions. In essence, the scenario highlights the physical properties and mechanical behaviors of materials under stress, which is central to the field of materials science within physics.