For this experiment, I'm going to use a vacuum pump. If you've ever seen one of those old sci-fi movies where someone is making wine and uses a vacuum pump to suck all the air out of their bottle before corking it, then you're familiar with how this works. The vacuum pump creates negative pressure inside the bottle which causes atmospheric pressure outside the bottle to push down harder on the air inside—and whatever else happens to be in there too, like your hand.
Yes, but there's a few caveats
You may be wondering whether the glass bottle will break. The answer is yes, but there's a few caveats. If you're going to be breaking bottles with suction, make sure they are brittle and thin and that they are under vacuum. Compression, high temperature and stress can also help your cause—but only if it's a bad day for the bottle in question.
If you could create a situation in which you're creating enough suction to break a glass bottle, then yes
The answer is that if you could create a situation in which you're creating enough suction to break a glass bottle, then yes.
But now for the important part: What does "enough suction" mean? And why would it be hard to get there?
Well, first of all, how much vacuum pressure does it take to break a glass bottle? This is actually an interesting question for scientists (and for many other fields). And even though I'm not an engineer or scientist by trade, I'll make some educated guesses as we go along.
Now let's say you have this wine bottle full of wine and you want to drink some of it. You could just drink it normally—but what fun would that be? Plus you'd probably spill some on yourself! So instead let's say we want to try doing something different with our wine-drinking experience: let's try drinking out of this weird contraption that uses science magic powers to suck all the air out of our world inside one second flat! Let's get started!
The primary concern is that the glass becomes brittle and breaks
The primary concern is that the glass becomes brittle and breaks. Glass is a brittle material, meaning it can break easily when stressed. It is not strong enough to withstand the pressure of suction for long.
In my experience vacuum pumphing with a refrigerator compressor (i.e. not high-vacuum), the glass does not become brittle or crack
It also does not break, even when very thin and fragile pieces are used.
Note that this is not to say that it's impossible for suction to break a bottle—it's just unlikely in any practical sense of the word "unlikely."
However, under production conditions (under vacuum) it does break so i think it does work, but with a small range of suction where this happens
The glass bottle breaks when you create a low pressure environment inside the bottle. Inside the bottle is air and therefore has some degree of pressure on it; this pressure cannot be removed without breaking something in your system (or creating another atmosphere). The more pressure that can be removed from within the system, the lower that internal air pressure will become and thus allowing for more breaking to occur.
Using what we know about how materials behave under different temperatures, pressures and times/durations we can try to create an environment where our glass bottles break as needed for our purposes!
Vacuum can help break glass bottles
It's a common misconception that only pressure can break a glass bottle. In fact, the pressure inside the vacuum is so great that it can cause the glass to fracture. However, breaking a bottle by removing air from it requires specialized equipment and is not as easy as simply sucking on one end of the bottle. You could also try freezing your beer or water jug in order to see what happens when you remove all of its moisture from within; but with this method there are many variables including how cold your freezer is set at and how long it takes for each type of container used (e.g., plastic vs metal).
So, if you want to break a glass bottle with vacuum, I think it's possible but there are a few caveats. First, you'll need to create enough suction for the glass to become brittle and break. The second caveat is that this will only happen within a certain range of suctions; if it gets too strong then you'll just end up with an airtight seal instead which isn't what we're looking for either!
