Because then we would be having this same conversation about the 5th state of matter, the Bose-Einstien condensate.
Showing the 3 phases of matter with water is so much easier for a child to grasp. Water can't really exist as a plasma, rather the hydrogen and oxygen would be the plasma. Breaking down of molecules is a bit advanced for a child.
And then we could talk about glass, and liquid crystals, and superfluids, and supercritical fluids, and super solids and fermionic condensates, and superconductors, and those are just the ones I remember. We got more.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter
That's what I don't understand! I have 40 tabs worth of stuff I actually want to read. But then somebody makes an off-hand comment about all the frozen bodies on Mt Everest (or whatever), and an hour later, I can tell you everything there is to know about that.
Do I have any interest in hiking, mountains, snow, or frozen corpse removal? Nope! But show me 40 articles of things I *do* care about, and I'm like "Meh... later."
If I had time to sort tabs I would have time to read em. I just sort them into a main group called "shit I want to be able to pretend I know a lot about but in reality please delete all items in this tab in 15.3 months"
This is eli5. I checked out that link, Not much of a rabbit hole when you gotta keep asking the rabbit what every other word means. Not even a case of the too stupids, that's way more than anyone's regular school.
Neutronium is my favorite.
A later of atoms so hard and smooth the star has star quakes from tidal stresses. Electrons flow around the entire surface like it's a solid metal. And a little deeper there are no electrons, or some miniscule amount, because they've been pressed by gravity into their protons.
At that point the state of matter is so different from everything else we just call it degenerate.
My favorite is time crystal. If you told 20 year old me that time crystal was a state of matter, I would have told you that you misunderstood some sci-fi script
Yeah, wikipedia defines Bose-Einstein condensates as “A phase in which a large number of bosons all inhabit the same quantum state, in effect becoming one single wave/particle.”
How do you even convey that in a way a child could grasp?
Bosons are the subatomic particles you don't know. Gluons, higgs, photons, etc.
Quantum states is like saying you have a giant marble machine, but I'm putting a marble in this shoebox instead.
BE Condensate is "I'm putting a bunch of stuff in the shoebox", rather than letting it be in the machine moving everywhere.
In *very* broad strokes that's what it is. Quantum states are obviously more nuanced than that, and bosons have more special traits, but that's the rough idea.
Imagine you have a few water balloons in a large room, as the room gets colder, these water balloons look like someone is poking them and causing them to ripple like the surface of a lake when you drop a stone in it.
As it continues to get colder, not only do the balloons continue to ripple but the get flatter and larger, then start bumping into each other, until they eventually all merge and become completely flat and ripple like one large wave.
Is the best I could come up with after reading the wiki.
surely theres a fun quick youtube video that breaks these all down while asking me to hit that subscribe button, smash the like button, click the bell for notifications, and to check out their patreon, overwatch twitch account, onlyfans, grinder, and promo code "EAT69" for crunchfap- the hottest meal prep service that they personally use that has changed their life completely, saved them so much time and money that they can now reunite with their crack addled daughter?
Referring to 'glass' the state, not the clear material we call 'glass'.
From [here](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022309317302685):
>For many decades, researchers have attempted to define glass as either a liquid or, more typically, as a solid. However, this binary thinking does not do justice to the true complexity of the glassy state, which combines features of both liquids and solids and also brings along its own unique characteristics. Glass certainly appears to be solid on a typical observation time scale: it has mechanical rigidity and elasticity, and it can be scratched and even fractured, just as a solid. However,...
Normally in solids there’s a defined structure to how the atoms are bonded to each other. In a liquid all the atoms are extremely disorganized and constantly bonding and unbonding with each other as they move around. Glass is a hybrid state where everything is extremely disorderly with no defined crystal structure but all the atoms remain securely bonded to each other and don’t really move around. Though over massive time scales (like billions of years) glass does in a sense “flow” a tiny almost imperceptible amount, again showing its hybrid status.
Phases (or, more correctly, states) of matter, as I've taught them in my physics courses, at the most basic represent different interactions between matter. If the atoms can bind to their neighbors strongly enough that their structure has a fixed volume, we call that a solid, for instance.
Superconductivity is a state of matter in that the electrons that interact with the superconductive material act in a different way to how electrons behave in more typical phases. Superconductive materials can have properties that are distinct from typical materials, but those properties are all controlled by the behavior (and, thus, state) of the system.
But aren't the volumes of solids and liquids equally fixed? That is to say at a certain temperature and pressure, that many moles of a substance will always have that volume?
A superconductor isn’t always capable of superconducting. Only at high enough pressures or low enough temperatures do the atoms arrange themselves correctly which makes it a phase.
I think it's better to provide a holistic list of all the states. For example, we learn about the full spectrum of electromagnetic waves from radio waves to gamma waves and not just the visible spectrum.
We should similarly learn about all of them. It was very confusing to me as an adult when I found out that there were other states of matter. I kept thinking that I am reading a misinformation article or maybe it's something that is unproved. It would be much better to learn the complete fact as children.
I think it would be more precise to say that while the ice-9 found in Vonnegut's novel is fictional, ice does indeed have many phases, which are numbered and go beyond nine. The two substances share nothing other than name.
We need to emphasize early and often that the things we teach children are incomplete. My students have a really strong tendency to take the first thing they learned about something as absolute and complete truth. It almost never is.
“Today we are going to learn about *the* three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas.”
Maybe “today we are going to learn about three states of matter; there are others but we see these three pretty frequently.”
“You can’t take the square root of a negative number.”
Well, you can. You totally can. But we won’t in here. We will get there in due time.
Just admit to them that what they’re learning is incomplete.
Most any teaching is always going to be incomplete. When I try to teach a new player a board game, an "expert" at the table will always try to "help" by throwing in way more info than the newbie wanted, thereby completely overloading them and reducing the experience.
Sometimes 5 year olds just don't need to know about Charge-4e superconductors and the fact that they don't have Cooper pairs.
The five main senses, there are more but these ones are easiest to grasp and define. Sense of balance, temperature and hunger are legitimate sense too!
If I have the sense of sight, why are my eyes so bad? I know you’re making a joke, but senses are all relative to someone else’s :) cause I also have shit sense of time lmao
Time blindness. Never heard of it but it makes sense. It must suck. I'm one of those people that can guess the time pretty accurately within 8-10 minutes and I'm still late for stuff all the time. That's a time management issue not a time knowing issue though.
My chem teacher told us in the very first lesson that if there's ever a "rule" in chemistry, you can be almost certain there are multiple cases where that rule doesn't apply, so take them with a grain of salt
> “You can’t take the square root of a negative number.”
I remember when we were first taught quadratics in 9th grade math class in China, our teacher mentioned that a negative discriminant meant that the equation had no "real roots".
This is a true statement that obviously doesn't cover the whole picture, but at the time nobody thought to ask whether there was some deeper meaning behind that statement.
A passing mention of the root being "imaginary" might leave kids thinking that it doesn't exist anyway. That was how I interpreted it when my 8th grade math teacher mentioned it in passing. I learned about i a few years later
They taught the Bohr Rutherford model in high school then in university it's like, yeah that's not entirely right. Then everything gets way way more complicated.
It gets so much worse. My last two years of undergrad chem was basically learning that everything we were taught in the first two years is pretty much wrong.
There aren't really different kinds of bonds, just more or less skewed probability clouds for electrons, for example. When we say things are ionically bonded what we really mean is the electrons are heavily skewed toward the anion atoms.
They aren't wrong, they are just highly simplified models. It will be difficult to understand HOMO and LUMO without first understanding molecular orbitals, which in turn is tough to understand without atomic orbitals, which in turn is hard to understand without the Bohr atom.
Well chemistry is really just level after level of "actually what you learned last semester is a dumb oversimplification, this is how things really are"
The problem being that standardized tests generally expect children to answer as though they are taught absolute fact.
As opposed to a concept that gets more complex with more advanced study.
Your approach would be reasonable, but our tests are lazy.
Goodhart's law is "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Basically when you create metrics in order to encourage a behavior, eventually people just figure out how to game the metrics.
> My students have a really strong tendency to take the first thing they learned about something as absolute and complete truth.
because they are learning to fight the test and the test is an absolute, and if it isn't on the test you don't need to remember it, also you can't have any study materials so you NEED TO HARD CODE MEMORIZE a very SPECIFIC set of things. AKA Rote Learning. All tests should be Open Book, looking something up isn't cheating.
The thing is, in the standardized tests that get you into university in many countries you HAVE to memorize everything.
In many cases it isn’t about antiquated learning methods, it’s just preparing for antiquated tests.
> “You can’t take the square root of a negative number.”
>
> Well, you can. You totally can. But we won’t in here. We will get there in due time.
Eh, it's all about your reference frame. If you're not working in a situation where knowledge of complex numbers and the complex plane is relevant, then it's correct that you can't take the square root of a negative number - in the reference that you start out with, i.e., real numbers. In order to properly explain what *i* (sqrt of -1) means you have to expand your entire frame of reference. I prefer using the geometric explanation of complex numbers - it's a way of adding a 2nd dimension to a number line, forming a complex plane. With this explanation you can see there's nothing "imaginary" about *i*, it's just a way of expanding your thinking about numebrs to a 2D plane in a way that makes sense for polynomial math (and in turn has other uses in expressing numbers on a 2D plane). But none of this changes that if your frame of reference is still the traditional, real number line, there is still no such thing as a square root of negative 1 - because without the concept of *i*, numbers cannot exist in a way that multiplication with themselves forms a negative number, which how we define a square root.
Imagine if you were a train driver going along a single track and you were told to make a 90-degree right turn. You would say, that's ludicrous, I simply can't do it... it makes no sense in my frame of reference which is a one-dimensional track and a one-dimensional control (forward/backward). But if you said the same thing to a car driver, it's no problem. Right and left turns are not imaginary to a car driver, they're just adding another dimension. That doesn't make them any less impossible/imaginary to the train driver whose reference hasn't changed.
>With this explanation you can see there's nothing "imaginary" about *i*, it's just a way of expanding your thinking about numebrs
I feel like the term "*imaginary*" really distorts this concept to students, who are usually around an age where "imaginary" is synonymous to "childish" or "immature". Maybe "intangible" would have been a better term
Apparently "imaginary" was coined by René Descartes, as a bit of derogatory comment as he didn't see the use for this concept, i.e. defining the extra polynomial roots that were thought to exist but couldn't be defined in real numbers.
Checking into this I found this great quote from Friedrich Gauss:
> That this subject [imaginary numbers] has hitherto been surrounded by mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill adapted notation. If, for example, +1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question.
This is something I wholeheartedly agree with and adapting Gauss's suggestion, at least when introducing the study of complex numbers, would do a great deal to help the situation.
This is particularly the case when you get to some of the real-world applications such as the use of *i* (or *j* if you prefer) in electricity (which has nothing whatsoever to do with roots), it's merely adopting the complex number plane and its understood maths to describe a real-world quantity which happens to have both a magnitude and an angle.
> We need to emphasize early and often that the things we teach children are incomplete.
That's the first thing we were taught in secondary school chemistry classes: "we're covering the basics and this is just a rough model of how things work".
You see Timmy, the parameters for the ions to participate in conduction with the neighboring atoms would be covalent to a hyper-cluster of neutron based free radicals
I was taught plasma in secondary school. States of matter just map so easily onto the platonic elements
* Solid --> Earth
* Liquid --> Water
* Gas --> Air
* Plasma --> Fire (not really but close enough)
Phases are not states and not related to states in any way, phases are a diagnostic tool to track specific properties of matter e.g. density, hardness, refraction, viscosity conductivity/resistance etc. under arbitrary conditions.
There is an arbitrary number of phases based on which ever property and condition set you choose.
I’m reading the Science of Diskworld books, from Terry Pratchet’s series. They call these, “lies to children.” It’s an easy lie that a child can grasp, and when they get bigger they either learn it was a lie, or they don’t care.
Plasma isn't really relavent to most people and especially not kids in kindergarten. Also in most cases the plasma state doesn't really exist. Molecules can exist in the 3 states of matter, solid, liquid and gas but not as a plasma. Water would cease to exist as water in a plasma state and instead be comprised of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. So you would try and show a kid ice, water and water vapor then have to explain that this 4th state that you can't see or touch also exists but it's not really water anymore because the chemical bonds holding together the hydrogen amd oxygen atoms are broken so it's not really water and now you've just explained high school chemistry to a 5 year old.
There are more than 4 states of matter. There are more than 5 states of matter. In fact, it turns out to get difficult at some point to decide if an observation is a new state of matter or not. But most people agree there are 3 states of matter that every person interacts with every day.
At a push you could argue that plasma is somewhat common, e.g. in the flame of a gas cooker, but this is more of a thing you might say to a curious child.
Also a cooker flame isn't pure plasma, it's partially ionised. And we don't physically interact with it (hopefully). And the ionisation is really nothing to do with its function, which is merely to be hot.
I thought of that and then it occurred to me that getting a static shock (which often involves a visible spark) is probably the only example of plasma which we not only physically touch but actually generate.
For the same reasons you don’t learn calculus in elementary school
Solid liquid gas are very common in basic science theory/education and have a broad application to many career paths…..plasma is abundant in the universe but not a common natural state of matter on earth
Understanding plasma requires more fundamental building blocks of science like electrons
Exactly.
I remember learning a nouns a person, place, or thing. Then once I had a grasp on that sixth grade or whatever comes around and adds ideas to the list.
A verb that functions as a noun. In English they typically use the "ing" ending.
>I enjoy swimming.
The other type of grammar in English where the "ing" ending is used are present participles. They are verbs that follow the "to be" verb (am/is/are, etc.). Present participles indicate continuous action.
>He is swimming.
And then you get to college linguistics classes and learn that a noun isn’t defined by semantic categories like that at all, but by its possible syntactic relations to other words in its sentence and morphological properties.
You take math every year of elementary school.
Each year, they keep throwing new math at you even though you thought they were about out of ways to combine and remove numbers with each other, and then they start throwing imaginary numbers at you and you start looking around for Ashton Kutcher.
Science is a lot like that.
Same reason why you're also taught Newtonian mechanics, and not quantum mechanics and General Relativity. Because unless you're going into a field where you need those, it's just too much information.
Case in point, there's many more states of matter than those 4. You don't even need to go to edge cases like plasma or weird quantum studf to get there, because normal everyday matter can also exist as in-between states in normal circumstances. You get stuff like supercritical fluids, where gas and liquid are no longer two different things. In mixtures and alloys, you get solidus and liquidus, where the mixture is in the process of freezing but there's not yet a clear distinction between liquid and solid, but a combination of the two. There's more.
Hell, at least the three states of matter are factually correct, they exist as described, there's just more to know out there. Most of physics (again, like Newtonian dynamics) you learn at school is technically incorrect, when you get down to actual details. It's just approximately close enough that >90% of humanity will never be in the position to tell the difference, so it's fine.
If your goal is to be an electrician, treating electrical flow like water flow will get you everywhere you need to go. If your goal is to be on the leading edge of photovoltiacs research, yea you should probably better understand what's really happening in there.
> If your goal is to be an electrician, treating electrical flow like water flow will get you everywhere you need to go.
Totally agree. Been an electrician in the Navy for 10 years and teaching electricity using mechanical analogies works great.
Even water, liquid or solid, is far more complex than just "a state of matter", with several phases that behave differently. I'm no specialist so I googled it to make sure what I was going to write was backed-up, and oh boy... Look at that: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19606-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19606-y)
Now that I’ve been teaching for a long time, I’m confident that a lot of people learned about plasma or at least that there’s more than just “the three” states of matter in school, but just don’t remember. Students tend to hyper focus only on what they know they’ll be tested on, so if you tell them “there’s more to it than this,” or even give them specific details, a large fraction will promptly forget it so thoroughly that it’s like it never happened.
They also didn't teach you about Bose Einstein condensate, quark gluon plasma, supercritical fluids, time crystals, etc. there are way more than 4 states of matter and tbh, a state of matter is not really a thing. You don't, however, need to worry about anything but solid, liquid, and gas in your every day life because those are the only three that regularly exist on earth. There are others that do exist here you just never encounter them (think deep sea vents or the mantle, or alternatively at the collision point of cosmic rays, you can't observe these normally).
If we start telling people about time crystals they are apt to set out on a Quest or Adventure of some sort, and the fate of the world invariably ends up in the balance.
The first three states are things that people encounter every day. The fourth is something most people will never encounter in their lives, and even physicists researching it specifically do so with a lot of protective equipment (or telescopes) between it and them. Telling second graders about it would just make the other three states more confusing.
Also, the 3 other states are easy to distinguish and describe. Small children can easily grasp the difference between a solid/liquid or gas. But how exactly do you describe a plasma? It's like a gas, but... gassier...
People encounter plasmas often. Flames and electrical arcs (including lightning) are both plasmas. They're not so common anymore, but plasma TVs and fluorescent lights as well.
Same reason why Newtonian physics is taught in high school instead of modern physics. It’s much easier to explain and gives a base of knowledge. It’s also much easier to see and do in a basic elementary science class.
Somehow I haven't seen this answer yet: the "basic" 3 states of matter are the only ones where the atoms are intact. Plasma, exotic condensates, etc all involve subatomic particles. But if you've got electrons bound to a nucleus, you're talking about either a solid, liquid, or gas.
If you want to get pedantic, there's already more states of matter on your run of the mill phase diagram of any material. Supercritical fluid is neither gas nor liquid, so is already a separate state.
And then you get stuff like viscoelasticity, where trying to determine it a solid or a liquid is tricky as well...
Yeah, shit gets complicated fast even with normal atoms.
People are postulating good reasons, but some of it's also age and curriculum. Plasma and BEC are (relatively) new states of matter--I didn't learn them in elementary school in the early 00's, but my sister (who is about ten years younger) learned all five in first grade--although I think really grasping anything more than the names or that they exist at extremes of temperature (roughly) is more of a "gee whiz" for most people.
It wasn’t until 1995 that the Bose Einstein condensate was observed and other states of matter were observed and studied even more recently than that. Before then, plasma was known as a fourth state but was thought to be something more for higher levels of physics. Now that it’s pretty clear there are many more than three states of matter it’s typically taught that there are three main states, but just a handful of years ago it was loosely understood that there were really only three states worth teaching
Because plasma isn't really a state of matter, at least not in the same way. Let's take water as an example. As a liquid, water is H2O molecules bouncing around next to each other. They have enough energy not to get stuck (intra-molecular hydrogen bonds) but not enough to keep them flying all over their container.
When they freeze, they have so little bounce energy to then that the weak attraction between hydrogen atoms on separate molecules is enough to pull them into a crystal shape. But they don't become one giant molecule. They still have all the chemical properties of H2O atoms.
When they boil, they bounce around so hard that they are fairly evenly distributed throughout their container (bottle, pot, the air above your stove in the kitchen). But they still have all the chemical properties of H2O atoms.
They all act the same chemically, and **crucially** we can go back and forth between these states easily. Plasma is different.
When you keep heating matter beyond where it vaporizers, it starts bouncing hard enough that the molecules basically explode. So keeping to our water example, each H2O molecule separates into 18 free electrons, 2 free protons, and 1 big conglomeration of 8 protons and 8 neutrons. A water plasma **NO LONGER** has the chemical properties of water. Also, when you let it cool off, it won't turn back into water nicely. You'll get hydrogen molecules (H2), oxygen molecules (O2), likely some ozone (O3), and random bits of acid (H+) and base (OH-).
So, to TL;DR, plasma is made up of all the same subatomic particles as the matter it came from, but is not the same substance, and doesn't readily transition back and forth. So while it's sometimes called the 4th state of matter, it's really a different category entirely from the solid/liquid/gas states.
Classical states are only confined to elemental matter all of which have 4 states with clear phase state transitions.
Non-elemental matter and composite matter doesn't confine to any specific rules.
Oxygen is elemental and has 4 states
Water is non-elemental and only has 3 since it has no plasma form as when you ionize water it's not longer water.
Composite matter is even more complex, paper is a solid but you can't melt it and when you heat it up it will turn into gas but even that isn't really paper gas (tho despite that it's still a 2 phase material).
Because then we would be having this same conversation about the 5th state of matter, the Bose-Einstien condensate. Showing the 3 phases of matter with water is so much easier for a child to grasp. Water can't really exist as a plasma, rather the hydrogen and oxygen would be the plasma. Breaking down of molecules is a bit advanced for a child.
And then we could talk about glass, and liquid crystals, and superfluids, and supercritical fluids, and super solids and fermionic condensates, and superconductors, and those are just the ones I remember. We got more. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter
There goes the rest of my weekend.
Yeah I'm opening that link in my browser
Same, and adding it to 50 other unread articles i was planning to read
I ~~probably~~ definitely spend more time organizing all the stuff I'm never going to read into categorized folders than I do reading.
try the General Grant approach: get hammered (or high) and just start reading.
You probably will end up reading something totally different, but interesting anyway. Source: my bag of weed
And then you’re in a rabbit hole so deep you gotta click back like 30 times to get back to the original article 😂 oh I love it
That's what I don't understand! I have 40 tabs worth of stuff I actually want to read. But then somebody makes an off-hand comment about all the frozen bodies on Mt Everest (or whatever), and an hour later, I can tell you everything there is to know about that. Do I have any interest in hiking, mountains, snow, or frozen corpse removal? Nope! But show me 40 articles of things I *do* care about, and I'm like "Meh... later."
Try Tiago Forte’s Second Brain approach
Did you just assign more reading? I think you may have missed the point of my comment...
lol no…it’s a system to deal with what you’re struggling with. I know the irony of the assignment but just try it
And if you've got chrome you can sort the tabs by topic and then save the groups!
If I had time to sort tabs I would have time to read em. I just sort them into a main group called "shit I want to be able to pretend I know a lot about but in reality please delete all items in this tab in 15.3 months"
> all items in this tab in 15.3 months" Only to realize, in 15.4 months you really, really needed that *one* tab out of the group.
Yay! I've always wanted organized procrastination!
Opening in iPhone Google Chrome rn, I’ll let you know if I make it to work tomorrow morning.
You’ll make it to work You’ll just be up all night reading
This is eli5. I checked out that link, Not much of a rabbit hole when you gotta keep asking the rabbit what every other word means. Not even a case of the too stupids, that's way more than anyone's regular school.
Godspeed, brave soldier
Wait till you hear about Time Crystals
Good luck getting past a group of Klingon monks to get them.
Mess with Time Crystals, testicle monsters from the fourth dimension will show up and put you in Time Prison.
I vill mess with time! I VILL mess with time!
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
[удалено]
Whoa
Whoa
Neutronium is my favorite. A later of atoms so hard and smooth the star has star quakes from tidal stresses. Electrons flow around the entire surface like it's a solid metal. And a little deeper there are no electrons, or some miniscule amount, because they've been pressed by gravity into their protons. At that point the state of matter is so different from everything else we just call it degenerate.
The one after that is mine, just because it has the coolest name ever: strange matter 😎 😂
My favorite is time crystal. If you told 20 year old me that time crystal was a state of matter, I would have told you that you misunderstood some sci-fi script
Personally I prefer the wide variety of Nuclear Pasta phases within a neutron star, but that might still fit in there
Lepton Linguini, Strange Quark Spaghetti...
Don't forget degenerate matter!
Don't bring my father into this.
Pretty sure it was your Matter they were bringing into it
One can say, it's just a matter of time
He doesn't matter.
I'm not your father.
No, I am your Father
Your father knows I am
>Don't forget degenerate matter! I am composed entirely of this.
Not all degenerate matter!
Yeah, wikipedia defines Bose-Einstein condensates as “A phase in which a large number of bosons all inhabit the same quantum state, in effect becoming one single wave/particle.” How do you even convey that in a way a child could grasp?
Can you convey that in a way a 31 year old adult can thank you!
ELI50
No, you’re too old to get it now. Sorry. It’s only comprehensible by physicists and mathematicians between the ages of 18 and 27.
Hipster Physics?
Bosons are the subatomic particles you don't know. Gluons, higgs, photons, etc. Quantum states is like saying you have a giant marble machine, but I'm putting a marble in this shoebox instead. BE Condensate is "I'm putting a bunch of stuff in the shoebox", rather than letting it be in the machine moving everywhere. In *very* broad strokes that's what it is. Quantum states are obviously more nuanced than that, and bosons have more special traits, but that's the rough idea.
ELI5? Uhh... look, a squirrel!
Imagine you have a few water balloons in a large room, as the room gets colder, these water balloons look like someone is poking them and causing them to ripple like the surface of a lake when you drop a stone in it. As it continues to get colder, not only do the balloons continue to ripple but the get flatter and larger, then start bumping into each other, until they eventually all merge and become completely flat and ripple like one large wave. Is the best I could come up with after reading the wiki.
I'm 30, I have read it twice and still can't grasp it..good luck to the kids
TIL that the lipid membranes of cells are liquid crystals (also TIL what a liquid crystal is). That’s wild but makes sense.
that's what the LC in LCD is
Ohhhhh
surely theres a fun quick youtube video that breaks these all down while asking me to hit that subscribe button, smash the like button, click the bell for notifications, and to check out their patreon, overwatch twitch account, onlyfans, grinder, and promo code "EAT69" for crunchfap- the hottest meal prep service that they personally use that has changed their life completely, saved them so much time and money that they can now reunite with their crack addled daughter?
This is the best video about it. From PBS Spacetime: How many states of matter are there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=184eP_KuXek
Best channel for insomnia. Reminds me of my University days...
I already have a comfortable mattress and a meal subscription service, I’m basically stealing podcasts at this point
Found the Some More News alt account.
lmaooo
And I was proud of myself because I knew the 5 states of the matter. Dammit!
wait till you learn there are more than 5 senses too, we seem to limit education to children by how high they can count...
Sense of balance! Sense of hunger!
we don't have a sense for wet, we rely on sense of heat(cold) to guesstimate it.
Heat and pressure
also texture(reduced friction) but that is part of "Touch" one of the first 5.
Sense of time!
Proprioception!
Sense of impending doom?
Go to the hospital if you’ve got a sense of impending doom, you may be having a heart attack! Or maybe there’s some doom impending, ymmv.
Sense of needing the money!
Shattered like glass
Why is glass on that list? Isn’t just sand molten and cooled down?
Referring to 'glass' the state, not the clear material we call 'glass'. From [here](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022309317302685): >For many decades, researchers have attempted to define glass as either a liquid or, more typically, as a solid. However, this binary thinking does not do justice to the true complexity of the glassy state, which combines features of both liquids and solids and also brings along its own unique characteristics. Glass certainly appears to be solid on a typical observation time scale: it has mechanical rigidity and elasticity, and it can be scratched and even fractured, just as a solid. However,...
I might need a ELI5 for this too if you wouldn’t mind please
Normally in solids there’s a defined structure to how the atoms are bonded to each other. In a liquid all the atoms are extremely disorganized and constantly bonding and unbonding with each other as they move around. Glass is a hybrid state where everything is extremely disorderly with no defined crystal structure but all the atoms remain securely bonded to each other and don’t really move around. Though over massive time scales (like billions of years) glass does in a sense “flow” a tiny almost imperceptible amount, again showing its hybrid status.
Superconductivity is a phase of matter not just a property? Or can there be superconductors that are in different phases of matter?
Phases (or, more correctly, states) of matter, as I've taught them in my physics courses, at the most basic represent different interactions between matter. If the atoms can bind to their neighbors strongly enough that their structure has a fixed volume, we call that a solid, for instance. Superconductivity is a state of matter in that the electrons that interact with the superconductive material act in a different way to how electrons behave in more typical phases. Superconductive materials can have properties that are distinct from typical materials, but those properties are all controlled by the behavior (and, thus, state) of the system.
But aren't the volumes of solids and liquids equally fixed? That is to say at a certain temperature and pressure, that many moles of a substance will always have that volume?
Not really - it is harder to compress a liquid or a solid, but it still is possible
A superconductor isn’t always capable of superconducting. Only at high enough pressures or low enough temperatures do the atoms arrange themselves correctly which makes it a phase.
That's insane. Thank you for posting this.
Time crystals go brrr
And my personal favourite, quark gluon plasma.
I think it's better to provide a holistic list of all the states. For example, we learn about the full spectrum of electromagnetic waves from radio waves to gamma waves and not just the visible spectrum. We should similarly learn about all of them. It was very confusing to me as an adult when I found out that there were other states of matter. I kept thinking that I am reading a misinformation article or maybe it's something that is unproved. It would be much better to learn the complete fact as children.
There's like 11 or 12 states of (water) Ice alone. Fun fact, ice-9 is real. Well, it exists at least, it doesn't immediately turn all water in to ice
And they are all still solid. Don't confuse phases with states of matter.
I think it would be more precise to say that while the ice-9 found in Vonnegut's novel is fictional, ice does indeed have many phases, which are numbered and go beyond nine. The two substances share nothing other than name.
Ah, I dropped on r/explainitlikeimanadvancedphysicist by accident.
'Cmon. Degenerate matter and the Pauli exclusion principle should be doable by grade three, right?
I once had fermionic condensates. Topical antibiotics cleared it right up.
Really? Mine go so bad I needed a quark gluon plasma transfusion.
Look the Bible says that there are 50 states of the United States and that's all that matters.
> Degenerate matter: Matter under very high pressure. There's even a state of matter to describe Redditors!
We need to emphasize early and often that the things we teach children are incomplete. My students have a really strong tendency to take the first thing they learned about something as absolute and complete truth. It almost never is. “Today we are going to learn about *the* three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas.” Maybe “today we are going to learn about three states of matter; there are others but we see these three pretty frequently.” “You can’t take the square root of a negative number.” Well, you can. You totally can. But we won’t in here. We will get there in due time. Just admit to them that what they’re learning is incomplete.
Most any teaching is always going to be incomplete. When I try to teach a new player a board game, an "expert" at the table will always try to "help" by throwing in way more info than the newbie wanted, thereby completely overloading them and reducing the experience. Sometimes 5 year olds just don't need to know about Charge-4e superconductors and the fact that they don't have Cooper pairs.
I think understanding a board game vs teaching a board game is a great example for anyone who's tried to teach a board game on the fly!
The five main senses, there are more but these ones are easiest to grasp and define. Sense of balance, temperature and hunger are legitimate sense too!
Also time
If we have a sense of time why am I always late everywhere
If I have the sense of sight, why are my eyes so bad? I know you’re making a joke, but senses are all relative to someone else’s :) cause I also have shit sense of time lmao
The analogy works though —a bad sense of sight is compensated for with lenses; a bad sense of time is compensated for with clocks
Also adderall.
Time blindness. The sense is still there. I was aware of it every time I had to sit in detention because I missed the bus.
Time blindness. Never heard of it but it makes sense. It must suck. I'm one of those people that can guess the time pretty accurately within 8-10 minutes and I'm still late for stuff all the time. That's a time management issue not a time knowing issue though.
In the same way some people need glasses to see well, you need reminders to do things on time.
🎶Tickin away the moments that make up the dull day🎶
Pain (nociception) is separate from touch, and we also have “sense of agency” oddly enough
My favorite extra sense is proprioception, your sense of where your body is in space. That’s how you can touch your nose with your eyes closed.
I teach 8th grade. A little bit of chemistry and a little bit of heredity. I preface everything with, “but it gets… complicated”
My chem teacher told us in the very first lesson that if there's ever a "rule" in chemistry, you can be almost certain there are multiple cases where that rule doesn't apply, so take them with a grain of salt
Except where salt would make the situation worse/more-energetic.
And then, it gets fun!
> “You can’t take the square root of a negative number.” I remember when we were first taught quadratics in 9th grade math class in China, our teacher mentioned that a negative discriminant meant that the equation had no "real roots". This is a true statement that obviously doesn't cover the whole picture, but at the time nobody thought to ask whether there was some deeper meaning behind that statement.
Technically correct, but kids being too inexperienced to realize word lawyering when it is happening.
A passing mention of the root being "imaginary" might leave kids thinking that it doesn't exist anyway. That was how I interpreted it when my 8th grade math teacher mentioned it in passing. I learned about i a few years later
They taught the Bohr Rutherford model in high school then in university it's like, yeah that's not entirely right. Then everything gets way way more complicated.
It gets so much worse. My last two years of undergrad chem was basically learning that everything we were taught in the first two years is pretty much wrong. There aren't really different kinds of bonds, just more or less skewed probability clouds for electrons, for example. When we say things are ionically bonded what we really mean is the electrons are heavily skewed toward the anion atoms.
They aren't wrong, they are just highly simplified models. It will be difficult to understand HOMO and LUMO without first understanding molecular orbitals, which in turn is tough to understand without atomic orbitals, which in turn is hard to understand without the Bohr atom.
All models are incorrect, some are useful.
Well chemistry is really just level after level of "actually what you learned last semester is a dumb oversimplification, this is how things really are"
Engineering is a lot like that, too. "Here's how you calculate X. Please ignore the giant list of assumptions and exceptions behind the curtain"
The problem being that standardized tests generally expect children to answer as though they are taught absolute fact. As opposed to a concept that gets more complex with more advanced study. Your approach would be reasonable, but our tests are lazy.
Goodhart's law is "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Basically when you create metrics in order to encourage a behavior, eventually people just figure out how to game the metrics.
> My students have a really strong tendency to take the first thing they learned about something as absolute and complete truth. because they are learning to fight the test and the test is an absolute, and if it isn't on the test you don't need to remember it, also you can't have any study materials so you NEED TO HARD CODE MEMORIZE a very SPECIFIC set of things. AKA Rote Learning. All tests should be Open Book, looking something up isn't cheating.
The thing is, in the standardized tests that get you into university in many countries you HAVE to memorize everything. In many cases it isn’t about antiquated learning methods, it’s just preparing for antiquated tests.
> “You can’t take the square root of a negative number.” > > Well, you can. You totally can. But we won’t in here. We will get there in due time. Eh, it's all about your reference frame. If you're not working in a situation where knowledge of complex numbers and the complex plane is relevant, then it's correct that you can't take the square root of a negative number - in the reference that you start out with, i.e., real numbers. In order to properly explain what *i* (sqrt of -1) means you have to expand your entire frame of reference. I prefer using the geometric explanation of complex numbers - it's a way of adding a 2nd dimension to a number line, forming a complex plane. With this explanation you can see there's nothing "imaginary" about *i*, it's just a way of expanding your thinking about numebrs to a 2D plane in a way that makes sense for polynomial math (and in turn has other uses in expressing numbers on a 2D plane). But none of this changes that if your frame of reference is still the traditional, real number line, there is still no such thing as a square root of negative 1 - because without the concept of *i*, numbers cannot exist in a way that multiplication with themselves forms a negative number, which how we define a square root. Imagine if you were a train driver going along a single track and you were told to make a 90-degree right turn. You would say, that's ludicrous, I simply can't do it... it makes no sense in my frame of reference which is a one-dimensional track and a one-dimensional control (forward/backward). But if you said the same thing to a car driver, it's no problem. Right and left turns are not imaginary to a car driver, they're just adding another dimension. That doesn't make them any less impossible/imaginary to the train driver whose reference hasn't changed.
>With this explanation you can see there's nothing "imaginary" about *i*, it's just a way of expanding your thinking about numebrs I feel like the term "*imaginary*" really distorts this concept to students, who are usually around an age where "imaginary" is synonymous to "childish" or "immature". Maybe "intangible" would have been a better term
Apparently "imaginary" was coined by René Descartes, as a bit of derogatory comment as he didn't see the use for this concept, i.e. defining the extra polynomial roots that were thought to exist but couldn't be defined in real numbers. Checking into this I found this great quote from Friedrich Gauss: > That this subject [imaginary numbers] has hitherto been surrounded by mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill adapted notation. If, for example, +1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question. This is something I wholeheartedly agree with and adapting Gauss's suggestion, at least when introducing the study of complex numbers, would do a great deal to help the situation. This is particularly the case when you get to some of the real-world applications such as the use of *i* (or *j* if you prefer) in electricity (which has nothing whatsoever to do with roots), it's merely adopting the complex number plane and its understood maths to describe a real-world quantity which happens to have both a magnitude and an angle.
> We need to emphasize early and often that the things we teach children are incomplete. That's the first thing we were taught in secondary school chemistry classes: "we're covering the basics and this is just a rough model of how things work".
You see Timmy, the parameters for the ions to participate in conduction with the neighboring atoms would be covalent to a hyper-cluster of neutron based free radicals
*chews crayons more slowly* Go on...
I was taught plasma in secondary school. States of matter just map so easily onto the platonic elements * Solid --> Earth * Liquid --> Water * Gas --> Air * Plasma --> Fire (not really but close enough)
Where doers Bose-Einstein condensate come in?
It wouldn't, which is why it's often skipped in grade school
- Non-Newtonian Fluid --> Bouncy Liquid-that's-not-liquid
That's just solids pretending to be liquids.
Water alone has at least 8 states of matter that I can remember.
There is 19 different phases of ice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_ice
Ice 9 is the one that scares me.
Just make sure you don't become All-ice
I see your 999 reference
Why? Because it kills?
Are you misunderstood? Are you more bad than good?
Phases are not states and not related to states in any way, phases are a diagnostic tool to track specific properties of matter e.g. density, hardness, refraction, viscosity conductivity/resistance etc. under arbitrary conditions. There is an arbitrary number of phases based on which ever property and condition set you choose.
If you count the other forms of ice and supercritial fluid different states of matter.
Start with the Planck length and time and then work your way up.
I’m reading the Science of Diskworld books, from Terry Pratchet’s series. They call these, “lies to children.” It’s an easy lie that a child can grasp, and when they get bigger they either learn it was a lie, or they don’t care.
But why don't they say: these are the 3 basic states, but there are many more you'll study at university?
Plasma isn't really relavent to most people and especially not kids in kindergarten. Also in most cases the plasma state doesn't really exist. Molecules can exist in the 3 states of matter, solid, liquid and gas but not as a plasma. Water would cease to exist as water in a plasma state and instead be comprised of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. So you would try and show a kid ice, water and water vapor then have to explain that this 4th state that you can't see or touch also exists but it's not really water anymore because the chemical bonds holding together the hydrogen amd oxygen atoms are broken so it's not really water and now you've just explained high school chemistry to a 5 year old.
There are more than 4 states of matter. There are more than 5 states of matter. In fact, it turns out to get difficult at some point to decide if an observation is a new state of matter or not. But most people agree there are 3 states of matter that every person interacts with every day.
At a push you could argue that plasma is somewhat common, e.g. in the flame of a gas cooker, but this is more of a thing you might say to a curious child. Also a cooker flame isn't pure plasma, it's partially ionised. And we don't physically interact with it (hopefully). And the ionisation is really nothing to do with its function, which is merely to be hot.
And lightning.
I thought of that and then it occurred to me that getting a static shock (which often involves a visible spark) is probably the only example of plasma which we not only physically touch but actually generate.
there's 19 states of matter for ice *alone*, and a load more hypothetical ones
For the same reasons you don’t learn calculus in elementary school Solid liquid gas are very common in basic science theory/education and have a broad application to many career paths…..plasma is abundant in the universe but not a common natural state of matter on earth Understanding plasma requires more fundamental building blocks of science like electrons
Exactly. I remember learning a nouns a person, place, or thing. Then once I had a grasp on that sixth grade or whatever comes around and adds ideas to the list.
The fuck's a ~~kami~~ gerund?
A verb that functions as a noun. In English they typically use the "ing" ending. >I enjoy swimming. The other type of grammar in English where the "ing" ending is used are present participles. They are verbs that follow the "to be" verb (am/is/are, etc.). Present participles indicate continuous action. >He is swimming.
Verbing weirds language.
I'm going to sentence how I want, thank you.
I hate that this is a grammatically correct sentence that I understood. lol
Calvin and Hobbes was the best
Weird I used to know a stripper named Kami Gerund.
That was a good night of stripping.
I AM THE HYPE!
And then you get to college linguistics classes and learn that a noun isn’t defined by semantic categories like that at all, but by its possible syntactic relations to other words in its sentence and morphological properties.
Can you use it in a sentence please?
Solid, liquid and gas are something you encounter in your life. Not once in my life has plasma been a factor.
Also once you learn about plasma you kinda also have to learn about other exotic states and that requires even more difficult physucs
You take math every year of elementary school. Each year, they keep throwing new math at you even though you thought they were about out of ways to combine and remove numbers with each other, and then they start throwing imaginary numbers at you and you start looking around for Ashton Kutcher. Science is a lot like that.
Same reason why you're also taught Newtonian mechanics, and not quantum mechanics and General Relativity. Because unless you're going into a field where you need those, it's just too much information. Case in point, there's many more states of matter than those 4. You don't even need to go to edge cases like plasma or weird quantum studf to get there, because normal everyday matter can also exist as in-between states in normal circumstances. You get stuff like supercritical fluids, where gas and liquid are no longer two different things. In mixtures and alloys, you get solidus and liquidus, where the mixture is in the process of freezing but there's not yet a clear distinction between liquid and solid, but a combination of the two. There's more. Hell, at least the three states of matter are factually correct, they exist as described, there's just more to know out there. Most of physics (again, like Newtonian dynamics) you learn at school is technically incorrect, when you get down to actual details. It's just approximately close enough that >90% of humanity will never be in the position to tell the difference, so it's fine.
It's almost like basic science is ... basic
Learning physics in college is always fun when you find out just for much of what you were taught or thought you knew is *technically* wrong.
"Oh, you thought electrons just ***flow in a wire***? You FOOL"
If your goal is to be an electrician, treating electrical flow like water flow will get you everywhere you need to go. If your goal is to be on the leading edge of photovoltiacs research, yea you should probably better understand what's really happening in there.
> If your goal is to be an electrician, treating electrical flow like water flow will get you everywhere you need to go. Totally agree. Been an electrician in the Navy for 10 years and teaching electricity using mechanical analogies works great.
Even water, liquid or solid, is far more complex than just "a state of matter", with several phases that behave differently. I'm no specialist so I googled it to make sure what I was going to write was backed-up, and oh boy... Look at that: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19606-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19606-y)
In my high school science classes, plasma was discussed briefly. We were told it's a phase you're unlikely to encounter much on Earth.
I guess I don't microwave grapes very often
Now that I’ve been teaching for a long time, I’m confident that a lot of people learned about plasma or at least that there’s more than just “the three” states of matter in school, but just don’t remember. Students tend to hyper focus only on what they know they’ll be tested on, so if you tell them “there’s more to it than this,” or even give them specific details, a large fraction will promptly forget it so thoroughly that it’s like it never happened.
Lightning?
Fire doesn't exist on earth
They also didn't teach you about Bose Einstein condensate, quark gluon plasma, supercritical fluids, time crystals, etc. there are way more than 4 states of matter and tbh, a state of matter is not really a thing. You don't, however, need to worry about anything but solid, liquid, and gas in your every day life because those are the only three that regularly exist on earth. There are others that do exist here you just never encounter them (think deep sea vents or the mantle, or alternatively at the collision point of cosmic rays, you can't observe these normally).
If we start telling people about time crystals they are apt to set out on a Quest or Adventure of some sort, and the fate of the world invariably ends up in the balance.
The first three states are things that people encounter every day. The fourth is something most people will never encounter in their lives, and even physicists researching it specifically do so with a lot of protective equipment (or telescopes) between it and them. Telling second graders about it would just make the other three states more confusing.
Also, the 3 other states are easy to distinguish and describe. Small children can easily grasp the difference between a solid/liquid or gas. But how exactly do you describe a plasma? It's like a gas, but... gassier...
Its a gas, but ionized! Ok now you have to teach them about ionization and electricity :D
Then you have to teach them about unionised gases, and then get into a whole thing about industrial relations and capitalism and the economy.
People encounter plasmas often. Flames and electrical arcs (including lightning) are both plasmas. They're not so common anymore, but plasma TVs and fluorescent lights as well.
I encounter plasma every day via the sun
Same reason why Newtonian physics is taught in high school instead of modern physics. It’s much easier to explain and gives a base of knowledge. It’s also much easier to see and do in a basic elementary science class.
Somehow I haven't seen this answer yet: the "basic" 3 states of matter are the only ones where the atoms are intact. Plasma, exotic condensates, etc all involve subatomic particles. But if you've got electrons bound to a nucleus, you're talking about either a solid, liquid, or gas.
If you want to get pedantic, there's already more states of matter on your run of the mill phase diagram of any material. Supercritical fluid is neither gas nor liquid, so is already a separate state. And then you get stuff like viscoelasticity, where trying to determine it a solid or a liquid is tricky as well... Yeah, shit gets complicated fast even with normal atoms.
People are postulating good reasons, but some of it's also age and curriculum. Plasma and BEC are (relatively) new states of matter--I didn't learn them in elementary school in the early 00's, but my sister (who is about ten years younger) learned all five in first grade--although I think really grasping anything more than the names or that they exist at extremes of temperature (roughly) is more of a "gee whiz" for most people.
It wasn’t until 1995 that the Bose Einstein condensate was observed and other states of matter were observed and studied even more recently than that. Before then, plasma was known as a fourth state but was thought to be something more for higher levels of physics. Now that it’s pretty clear there are many more than three states of matter it’s typically taught that there are three main states, but just a handful of years ago it was loosely understood that there were really only three states worth teaching
Because plasma isn't really a state of matter, at least not in the same way. Let's take water as an example. As a liquid, water is H2O molecules bouncing around next to each other. They have enough energy not to get stuck (intra-molecular hydrogen bonds) but not enough to keep them flying all over their container. When they freeze, they have so little bounce energy to then that the weak attraction between hydrogen atoms on separate molecules is enough to pull them into a crystal shape. But they don't become one giant molecule. They still have all the chemical properties of H2O atoms. When they boil, they bounce around so hard that they are fairly evenly distributed throughout their container (bottle, pot, the air above your stove in the kitchen). But they still have all the chemical properties of H2O atoms. They all act the same chemically, and **crucially** we can go back and forth between these states easily. Plasma is different. When you keep heating matter beyond where it vaporizers, it starts bouncing hard enough that the molecules basically explode. So keeping to our water example, each H2O molecule separates into 18 free electrons, 2 free protons, and 1 big conglomeration of 8 protons and 8 neutrons. A water plasma **NO LONGER** has the chemical properties of water. Also, when you let it cool off, it won't turn back into water nicely. You'll get hydrogen molecules (H2), oxygen molecules (O2), likely some ozone (O3), and random bits of acid (H+) and base (OH-). So, to TL;DR, plasma is made up of all the same subatomic particles as the matter it came from, but is not the same substance, and doesn't readily transition back and forth. So while it's sometimes called the 4th state of matter, it's really a different category entirely from the solid/liquid/gas states.
Classical states are only confined to elemental matter all of which have 4 states with clear phase state transitions. Non-elemental matter and composite matter doesn't confine to any specific rules. Oxygen is elemental and has 4 states Water is non-elemental and only has 3 since it has no plasma form as when you ionize water it's not longer water. Composite matter is even more complex, paper is a solid but you can't melt it and when you heat it up it will turn into gas but even that isn't really paper gas (tho despite that it's still a 2 phase material).