What are all fourteen states of matter?

Question

i know the 4 - gas plasma liquid and solid. but i heard there were 14.

Answer 1

there a phases, which isn't a state, it is a inbetween area.  these consist of things like bose-einsteinian condensates and stuff

Answer 2

The Wikipedia link leads you to a list of "states" but you need to understand that some of these "states" are theoretical and many of them are not easily observed in nature.

There are three primary phases of matter under "normal" observational circumstances.  These are solid, liquid, and gas.  BUT ... under some extreme cases you can get special states - plasma being one, critical fluid being another, where the lines between states become blurred.  After that, you come to so-called "second-order phase transitions" - where the observable first-order phase doesn't change - but some property of that material DOES change.

A couple of simple examples of second-order phase transitions:

When you heat a magnet hot enough you reach the Curie point.  The magnetic domains become scrambled and you no longer have a magnet.  Yet nothing melted.  The crystal appears the same even under an electron microscope.

When you take certain alloys (e.g. tantalum/niobium mixes) down to very low temperatures, they remain solid, but their electron domains start to resonate with each other, leading to delocalization and then to superconductivity.  (See, for example, the work of John Bardeen and his associates, Cooper and Schreifer, in the 1970s.)  This is one of those oddball low-temperature states that are listed early in the article.

Some of the situations listed in Wikipedia are subject to debate over precise nomenclature.  For example, "plastic solids" sounds like one of those phases in which you have an extreme condition to prevent crystallization from happening.  As an old-line purist, I would suggest that "14 states of matter" is dependent on you specifying the nature of the extreme conditions that lead to such a state, because none of those odd-ball states are like to occur without some help.

In summary, there are as many states of matter as the experimenter wants to consider, but most of the "extra" states involve very subtle changes that are beyond most laymen to understand.

Answer 3

Here you go

Answer 4

I've never heard there were 14...

I've heard Solid, Liquid, Plasma, and Gas.  Maybe everything inbetween equals 14?

1 Gas

2 Solid

3 Liquid

4 Plasma

5 Gas-solid

6 gas-liquid

7 gas-plasma

8 solid-liquid

9 solid-plasma

10 liquid-plasma

Haha, nope.  Not even that.  Sorry; onl four...or ten, it seems.

Answer 5

Solid

Liquid

Gas

Ionized Plasma

Quark-gluon plasma

Bose-Einstein condensate

fermionic condensate

Superfluids

Supersolid

It is not 14 but it is the best i could do