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November 28, 2007
The State of Matter
When we were small and largely innocent, when we were young and at school, we were told, with great confidence, that there were three ways stuff could be: solid, liquid or gas. And the world was a happier place because of this.
Then, when you leave school and start learning things, you find stuff ain’t that straightforward after all. And the world? – well it’s isn’t the place you were brought up to believe it was.
States of Matter:
Solid
Liquid
Gas
Amorphous Solid
Plasma
Superfluid
Supersolid
Degenerate Matter
Neutronium
Strongly Symmetric Matter
Weakly Symmetric Matter
Quark-Gluon Plasma
Fermionic Condensate
Bose-Einstein Condensate
Strange Matter
Hot Dark Matter
Cold Dark Matter
In fact the list goes on because, at this level, whether something is matter or not becomes somewhat blurred, which is not surprising when stuff like Hot Dark Matter is travelling at ultrarelativistic velocity.
a wispy ring of dark matter, NASA/ESA/MJ Jee/John Hopkins University
I like the fact that there are people working this stuff out and, if they work out just how weak and how symmetric Weakly Symmetric Matter is, we might be able to find out what happens next.
Though of course if the turtles ever get to hear of it we're done for.
Posted by john at November 28, 2007 11:09 AM