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
Comment on nooo my genderinos
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
I’m a career physicist, and I honestly have no idea what a state of matter is anymore.
axont@hexbear.net 1 month ago
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Loads of pressure? Even Quarks get metallic with more pressure.
axont@hexbear.net 1 month ago
Yeah apparently there’s metallic nitrogen in the Earth’s core
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
An abstraction used for grouping kinds of things together for the purposes of making thinking about them a lot faster.
nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
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 nest boxes but nature is under no deal obligation to cooperate.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
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.lunarul@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Simple, “solid state” means “no moving parts”, like a vacuum tube, for example.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
You’d be surprised.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Well I know the liquid phase is what happened after I ate at that filthy pizza place. Yikes.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Could there be a spherical object inside that tube? Just for familiarities sake
TomasEkeli@programming.dev 1 month ago
Only if it’s a cow
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Are gas atoms spherical?
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Interacting fields of possibilities?
la508@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Can I offer you a nice smectic B3 liquid crystal in this trying time?
MycelialMass@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You may not.