# How many stated of matter are there now?

**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-stated-of-matter-are-there-now/86552
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [October 10, 2001, 11:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-stated-of-matter-are-there-now/86552 "2001-10-10T11:51:12Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![kanicbird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f8ce5/32.png) [@kanicbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kanicbird)
#### Post date: [October 10, 2001, 11:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-stated-of-matter-are-there-now/86552/1 "2001-10-10T11:51:12Z")

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Lets see you have the solid, liquid, gas, plasma

then we’ve added a Einstein-Bose condensate to make 5

I’ve heard that a superheated plasma would change into another plasma where the protons and nutrons fly apart - I don’t know what it’s called but that would make 6

then this super cooled gas makes 7

is there an artificial state where a molecule is trapped inside another that is another s.o.m making 8?

now I’m going off on things that I’ve never heard of being a s.o.m but makes sense to me :

nutron star making 9?

black hole (even though maybe it’s just a nutron star in there - we don’t know) would make 10?

Any more or any disqualifications?

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### Author: ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)
#### Post date: [October 10, 2001, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-stated-of-matter-are-there-now/86552/2 "2001-10-10T13:12:20Z")

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I hate it when this is done to me but I’ll do it anyway since almost this exact same question can be found in the thread [How Many States of Matter are There? 3, 4 or 5?](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=26766).

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### Author: ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)
#### Post date: [October 10, 2001, 1:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-stated-of-matter-are-there-now/86552/3 "2001-10-10T13:14:56Z")

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Oops…

I meant to add to my previous post the following quote from Chronos which seems to answer the question if people don’t want to wade throught the other post…

> [@](#):
>
> _Written by Chronos:_  
> By varying enough conditions (temperature, pressure, composition, etc), there’s no practical limit on how many states of matter you could come up with-- When people say 3, they mean three familiar ones.