this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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I'm a career physicist, and I honestly have no idea what a state of matter is anymore.
Can I offer you a nice smectic B3 liquid crystal in this trying time?
You may not.
yeah i have a bachelor's in chemistry and I remember a professor earnestly saying the phrase "metallic phase nitrogen" and I think I went home and stared at the ceiling for an hour
Loads of pressure? Even Quarks get metallic with enough pressure.
Yeah apparently there's metallic nitrogen in the Earth's core
An abstraction used for grouping kinds of things together for the purposes of making thinking about them a lot faster.
I would wager you have more of an idea of what a state of matter is than biologists do of what a species is. Humans like to put things into neat boxes but nature is under no deal obligation to cooperate.
I'd actually argue the opposite. With states of matter, we're attempting to delineate how reality groups together sets of related properties that vary between conditions in similar ways for different substances.
Looking for the edges that nature drew.
With species though, we drew the lines. We drew them with a mind towards ensuring it's objectively measurable but it's still not a natural delineation. Taxonomists (biologists are actually a different field) mostly run into uncertainty with debating which categorization property takes precedence, and what observations of species have actually been made.
So while they debate which system to use, the particulars of the systems are pretty concrete.
States of matter and species are both cases where we drew the lines based on what we thought was obvious. Then we ran into cases that were not so obvious anymore and challenged how we define these lines.
Simple, "solid state" means "no moving parts", like a vacuum tube, for example.
You'd be surprised.
Well I know the liquid phase is what happened after I ate at that filthy pizza place. Yikes.
Could there be a spherical object inside that tube? Just for familiarities sake
Only if it's a cow
Are gas atoms spherical?
Interacting fields of non-causality?