  A broad fundamental understanding of the mechanisms underlying the
phenomenology of supercooled liquids has remained elusive, despite decades of
intense exploration. When supercooled beneath its characteristic melting
temperature, a liquid sees a sharp rise in its viscosity over a narrow
temperature range, eventually becoming frozen on laboratory timescales.
Explaining this immense increase in viscosity is one of the principle goals of
condensed matter physicists. To that end, numerous theoretical frameworks have
been proposed which explain and reproduce the temperature dependence of the
viscosity of supercooled liquids. Each of these frameworks appears only
applicable to specific classes of glassformers and each possess a number of
variable parameters. Here we describe a classical framework for explaining the
dynamical behavior of supercooled liquids based on statistical mechanical
considerations, and possessing only a single variable parameter. This parameter
varies weakly from liquid to liquid. Furthermore, as predicted by this new
classical theory and its earlier quantum counterpart, we find with the aid of a
small dimensionless constant that varies in size from $\sim 0.05-0.12$, a
universal (16 decade) collapse of the viscosity data as a function of
temperature. The collapse appears in all known types of glass forming
supercooled liquids (silicates, metallic alloys, organic systems, chalcogenide,
sugars, and water).
