http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050321_big_bang.html
who doesn’t love this kind of stuff? I can’t help but marvel at our own advanced scientific achievement. We can measure events that occur in a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a second. This kind of stuff always makes me optimistic about humanity and progress.
How about 7. Planck temperture, where all forces unite in a supersymetric “superforce”.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050321_big_bang.html
who doesn’t love this kind of stuff? I can’t help but marvel at our own advanced scientific achievement. We can measure events that occur in a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a second. This kind of stuff always makes me optimistic about humanity and progress.
I feel great optimism too, But what happens if some random scientist somewhere creates an unusual ultra-powerful explosion with new exotic matter – and accidentally vaporizes the whole earth? Isn’t some of this stuff scary?
Well, for one that hasn’t been created in the lab yet; for two, I’m not sure you could call that a separate state of matter.
You could. In supersymetry all the forces and matter merge. It would be the ultimate and original “state of matter”.
I feel great optimism too, But what happens if some random scientist somewhere creates an unusual ultra-powerful explosion with new exotic matter – and accidentally vaporizes the whole earth? Isn’t some of this stuff scary?
What happens if you all of a sudden burst into flame via a sudden combustion? You need to understand the difference between the arbitrary and the real.
I feel great optimism too, But what happens if some random scientist somewhere creates an unusual ultra-powerful explosion with new exotic matter – and accidentally vaporizes the whole earth? Isn’t some of this stuff scary?
This post is a prime example of what I’d call the “Pandora’s Box Paradigm”. It’s the idea that any new discovery or invention, along with its potential for good, will have equal, or more, potential to cause disaster.
I think this paradigm must sometimes be true, or it wouldn’t have come about in the first place. But I also think that it is so deeply engrained in our culture that it’s automatically applied to any new discovery or invention, making many feel apprehensive. The question that is un-answered is, “What horrible thing might happen if we DON’T open the box?” It could well be that the unopened boxes have led to much human misery that could have been prevented. I am thinking of the fear of “playing God” through stem cell research, cloning, and the like.
I’ve never heard of the Einstein-Bose condensate. What is it?
An Einstien-Bose Condenstate is when mattered has cooled to within a hair of absolute zero and a glob of many atoms of it is all in one quantum state and acts like it is one bosonic atom. This is usually accomplished using multiple lasers to kick out energetic atoms and less energetic atoms are trapped in a magnetic trap.
Isn’t this a sixth state of matter?
Going from cold to hot:
Einstein-Bose condensate
Solid
Liquid
Gas
Electrical Plasma
Quark-Gluon Plasma* (new!)
Well, there are more states of matter that have been observed.
Going from cold to hot (…roughly), the ones I know of (that have been created in labs) are:
1.) Fermionic condensates – fermions, at low enough temperatures, form Cooper pairs and act like bosons in an Einstein-Bose condensate.
2.) Einstein-Bose condensates – I’m not sure of the exact mechanisms by which this works, but it has something to do with the fact that the particles which go into this state are bosons and tend to go into the same quantum state. When cooled to a low enough temperature (higher than the temperature required for fermionic condensates to form), bosonic subtances such as helium become superfluids which have zero viscocity.
3.) Crystalline solids – solids which exhibit a periodic crystalline structure.
4.) Quasi-crystals – solids which exhibit a patterned, but aperiodic structure.
5.) Amorphous solids, or glasses – rigid substances with no definite crystal structure.
6.) Liquid crystals (or was it crystal liquid?) – I don’t know anything about it.
7.) Liquids – a non-rigid substance without a definite shape, with a definite volume, which exhibits a nonzero viscocity.
8.) Gasses – Substance without a definite shape or volume… probably some other factors in defining it which I’m not aware of.
9.) …I’m not sure of the name for this, but it’s an odd fluid of some sort which you get when you raise a substance’s temperature beyond the critical temperature, where seperate liquid and gas phases no longer exist.
10.) Electrical plasma – Electrons are no longer bound to atoms.
11.) Gluon-quark plasma – Quarks are no longer bound together. I haven’t heard anything about this until now.
So unless I’ve missed something (I probably have), this is the 11th state of matter created in a lab.
…and then there are all those that haven’t been created in labs yet, like supersymmetric matter, which Rational One was referring to. It is classified as a phase/state of matter, by the way.
9.) …I’m not sure of the name for this, but it’s an odd fluid of some sort which you get when you raise a substance’s temperature beyond the critical temperature, where seperate liquid and gas phases no longer exist.
Supercritical fluids i think. Although it is still technically labeled as a gas.
10.) Electrical plasma – Electrons are no longer bound to atoms.
11.) Gluon-quark plasma – Quarks are no longer bound together. I haven’t heard anything about this until now.
Between your electrical plasma and gluon-quark plasma, there should be another state: the stuff of neutron-stars, sometimes called neutronium, consisting mostly of neutrons with some protons and electrons crushed to a density greater than atomic nuclei.
And some people have speculated that there maybe something like neutronium, but denser, containing also lambda particles and perhaps other hadrons.
Also there are many substances which have multiple crystalline phases (at varying pressures and temperatures) with different unit cells and/or different symmetries.
There may also be substances with multiple liquid phases although these are harder to describe.
I didn’t include neutronium because I didn’t think it had been created in a laboratory; I was listing states which I knew had been created in a lab, but the list of all states created and predicted by theory would include neutronium and supersymmetric matter.
“Also there are many substances which have multiple crystalline phases”
Like carbon (ie, graphite and diamond) and sulfer (ie, monclinic and rhombic)… but the different crystalline phases are still all crystalline solids. Of course, they are different phases…
By the way, I’ve heard something about water having an alternative crystalline phase to ice when enough pressure is applied; could you tell me anything about that?
By the way, I’ve heard something about water having an alternative crystalline phase to ice when enough pressure is applied; could you tell me anything about that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_free_energy
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/ice/ice.htm
http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html
First let me say that I am not an expert on water or thermodynamics.
Generally, if a system’s pressure and temperature are held constant, then it will tend to seek the state which minimizes its Gibbs free energy. In particular, the solid, liquid, or other phase which has the least Gibbs free energy will tend to win out over other possible phases. For example, diamond is not stable at atmospheric pressure, but slowly changes to graphite.
In the case of water, at low pressures and temperatures, it will tend to adopt a structure which allows for maximum hydrogen bonding between the molecules. At higher pressures, more compact structures are favored.