The opening paragraph to David Goodstein’s “States of Matter” (1975, 1985 Dover Publ.):
“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.”
Loved Forward's "Dragon's Egg". There's a sequel -- "Starquake" -- which came out circa 1987.
Um, I remember reading two books (probably those. The Integral Trees - that’s the one which starts with an old tree breaking up, right? And the Smoke Ring features the relatively high-tech civilisation further in?), but I seem to remember the last ending on a couple of cliff hangers. Was it a trilogy?
What am I missing here? If the material in the sun has all the electrons stripped away how do you get to a Neutron star? I thought Neutron stars formed when gravity was strong enough to mash the electrons into the nucleus (no orbiting electrons anywhere). If plasma is a substance with no electrons what gives?
I have more of a mundane question: What is the state of matter is gel? (None of those “There is Something About Mary” jokes please). I heard and read that this not quite solid/not quite liquid condition is its own state of matter.
It is The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring. The SMoke Ring did leave some things unresolved. Suppossedly Niven is planning on writing a third book, but I haven’t heard anything definite.
Also, the environment is a ring of breathable atmosphere around a neutron star. The neutron star is part of a binary system and the other star provides the light and heat.
Thanks. It’s been a while since I read the series. I had forgotten it was part of a binary system. Since I knew they couldn’t possibly be getting enough energy from a neutron star, I guessed white dwarf.
Neutron star should have made more sense since a white dwarf is still pretty big and pumping out quite a lot of radiation for life at such close range.
Do you happen to remember what curious circumstances resulted in the smoke ring in the first place? Was it the remnants of a planet?
Stars collect gas, dust, and other material into orbit around them, but usually the density is quite low. I think the speculation is that a neutron star has sufficient gravity to collect a high density ring of gas and keep it from dissipating into interstellar space. I think the presence of a companion helps. I’m not at home so I don’t have the proper references.
I don’t think it was remnants of a planet, because if IIRC there was a Jovian size planet inside of the smoke ring that the colonist called Gold.
I realize this is a very old zombie and one of the earliest questions I ever posted on this message board. If the mods think this is too old and needs to be closed I understand. That said:
I recalled this old thread because, recently, the YouTube channel PBS Space Time looked in to this very question (see below, 14 minutes long). That is a long video but this is a very good channel and, I think, worth a watch. It adds important information to this question.
Eh, it’s folly to try to count them. Every fluid has some sort of relationship between pressure and density, what’s called an “equation of state”. Under Earthly conditions, one very common relationship is that density is constant (at least, to a very good approximation). We call fluids with constant density “liquids”. Another very common relationship is that pressure is proportional to density times temperature: We call fluids that (at least, approximately) match that “gases”. But those are not the only possible equations of state. You can also, for instance, have pressure proportional to density to some power. And for every different power you use, you have a different equation of state. So right there, there are as many possible different states of matter as there are numbers that can be used as exponents.
I’ve seen a supercritical fluid, behind a thick window in a small cell. If you’re going to count gas and liquid as separate phases, you have to count supercritical fluids as yet another. Though, you can go from gas to supercritical to liquid, and back again, without going through any remarkable changes – you can do it without ever having a surface become apparent, for example. So there’s an argument that these three aren’t really distinct phases. I mean, if you fold a dollar bill, there are places where it looks like a stack of two dollar bills, but that’s only apparent locally.
I think neutron stars have crusts and cores and perhaps further simplify to a quark soup in the center, so perhaps there are three or more phases there that don’t happen here. And the crust counts as something you can see, if you look at a pulsar like the Crab through a telescope.
Beta radiation is a stream of free electrons. That’s matter, and it’s not really in any of the other phases, so that would count, no?
Likewise alpha radiation, and neutrons, and protons such as in proton beam therapy.
I think liquid gels and aerosols and hydrasols and aerogels and foams could all count, as some others have pointed out.
Wiki:
In condensed matter physics, a time crystal is a quantum system of particles whose lowest-energy state is one in which the particles are in repetitive motion. The system cannot lose energy to the environment and come to rest because it is already in its quantum ground state. Because of this, the motion of the particles does not really represent kinetic energy like other motion; it has “motion without energy”. Time crystals were first proposed theoretically by Frank Wilczek in 2012 as a time-based analogue to common crystals — whereas the atoms in crystals are arranged periodically in space, the atoms in a time crystal are arranged periodically in both space and time. Several different groups have demonstrated matter with stable periodic evolution in systems that are periodically driven. In terms of practical use, time crystals may one day be used as quantum computer memory.
