# plasma-the 4th state of matter

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plasma-the-4th-state-of-matter/344764>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [February 16, 2006, 6:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plasma-the-4th-state-of-matter/344764 "2006-02-16T06:45:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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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:** [February 17, 2006, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plasma-the-4th-state-of-matter/344764/21 "2006-02-17T00:34:23Z")

</div>

I asked a [similar question](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=26766) awhile back. The answer seemed to be alot more than I suspected.

From that thread:

> [@](#):
>
> **Chronos wrote:**  
> 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.

> [@](#):
>
> **Indiana Jones wrote:**
> 
> 1. Solid
> 2. Liquid
> 3. Gas
> 4. Plasma
> 5. Superfluid – Helium II
> 6. Bose-Einstein condensate
> 7. Superconductor – though solid in form, it has fundamentally different electrical properties.
> 8. Neutronium – the stuff neutron stars are made of.
> 9. Supercritical fluid
> 10. Quark-Gluon soup – pump in enough energy and you force the quarks to dissociate out of the baryons.

Hard to sort it all out.

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