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Originally Posted by mr beer
When does that start happening? I've seen a couple of pop-sci articles about super-sharp glass scalpels and the like that implied they're superior to steel in some ways because of their sharpness, although obviously not as durable. So I guess there's a cut-off somewhere between the sharpness of a steel razor and atomic scale widths?
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Not so much that. Glass knife edges aren't much narrower than steel ones, maybe a factor of 2 or 3. What they are is less irregular in the other direction. If you pushed them both into a material edge on, there's probably little difference in performance, it's mostly when you make a draw cut there are fewer irregularities on the part a little back from the edge that can get caught on the cut tissue and tear some of it.
Edit: for some applications, glass is also harder than steel, so it doesn't deform as easily. The downside there being when a steel edge deforms it gets dull, where a glass one *breaks*. That probably doesn't matter so much for modern scalpels, which are essentially single use tools, though.