In grade school, we’re all taught that there are three states of matter: solids, liquids, and gases. But I’ve seen several other states of matter being added to the trio, such as plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates, supersolids, and the like. I’ve seen competing science news articles say that there are five, seven, and even as many as fifteen.
How many are there really?
In: 3
The answer is “as many as necessary.” Each state of matter has “something” different from the others. For example, plasma is a gas composed of ions (atoms with missing or extra electrons) instead of neutral atoms. The initial 3 (solid, liquid, gas) were based on differences in pressure and temperature, but as physics advanced, other properties of matter were included in the list.
So considering every little property that’s measurable and can be “different”, there can be a lot of states of matter.
[This wiki article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter) has a list of states of matter. Not sure if it’s “all of them.”
There are states which are mostly common to all matter and those technically have a limit to their number. There are also states that are specific to certain substances and these states of matter are essentially infinite as every combination of elements and molecules produces new states. Water alone has something like 15 states and counting. Steel has several. These are mostly sub-variations in the solid states but not exclusively. “States of matter” is kinda only loosely defined.
At some point, adults have to realize that a lot of the things we were taught in school growing up was highly simplistic and just to teach us the basics to be “well rounded”. Other examples:
– there are 5 senses
– there are three phases of matter
– you can never start a sentence with “Because” or end a sentence with a preposition
– electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom
Yadda yadda yadda.
Having these simplistic ideas that aren’t really true just stick around, but they do give the average person a general sense of understanding and the actual answer is much more complicated than most people need to know.
For science especially, almost everything we learned in school was dumbed down to the level of the students learning it. A true scientist wouldn’t definitively say “there are exactly X” (i.e., there are exactly three states of matter) for most things, but rather “repeatable testing has demonstrated the existence of X”
Latest Answers