Matter

- Overview

In school, you may have been taught the three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Then, you might come across a fourth: Plasma. 

However, there are also many less familiar states of matter, such as "Bose-Einstein condensates", "time crystals", etc.. So how many states of matter are there? 

The answer is that matter has four fundamental states -- solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. These are naturally occurring in the universe. Beyond that, there are exotic states of matter. These are states of matter that you certainly don't encounter in your everyday life, but the laws of physics allow.

- Atom

In general, an atom can be thought of as a nucleus of protons and neutrons, and a "cloud" of orbiting electrons that "take up space". However, this is only true to a certain extent, because subatomic particles and their properties are governed by their quantum properties, which means they don't act the way everyday objects seem to work - they can act like waves, too. Can act like particles, and they don't have a well-defined size or position. 

In the Standard Model of particle physics, matter is not a fundamental concept because the fundamental constituents of atoms are quantum entities with no inherent "size" or "volume" in any everyday sense. Due to the principle of repulsion and other fundamental interactions, some "point particles" called fermions (quarks, leptons), as well as many composite materials and atoms, are actually forced to distance themselves from other particles under everyday conditions; this creates matter The properties, it seems to us, that matter occupies space. 

For most of the history of natural science, people have been thinking about the exact properties of matter. The idea that matter is made of discrete building blocks, the so-called particle theory of matter, arose in ancient Greece and ancient India. Early philosophers who proposed the theory of particles of matter included Kanada (c. 6th century BC or later), Leucippus (c. 490 B.C.), and Democritus (c. 470-380 B.C.).

[Appenzell, Switzerland - Civil Engineering Discoveries]

- Matter and State of Matter

There are four natural states of matter, and one is man-made. H₂O in a glass is in three states of matter: ice (solid), water (liquid), and steam (gas). Matter has four natural states: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. The fifth state is an artificial Bose-Einstein condensate.

The same material can exist in many different forms, depending on factors such as temperature and pressure. Any of these forms is called a "state of matter". The state of matter determines how the molecules that make it up are arranged, how much they move, and the strength of the forces between them -- called intermolecular forces.

Each of the five states of matter collectively makes up all the "stuff" in the universe—everything that occupies space and has mass is matter. All matter is made up of atoms, which in turn are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. 

Atoms come together to form molecules, which are the building blocks of all types of matter. Both atoms and molecules are held together by a form of potential energy called chemical energy. Unlike kinetic energy, which is the energy of an object in motion, potential energy is the energy stored in an object.

- Neural Scaling of Deep Chemical Models

Massive scale, both in terms of data availability and computation, enables significant breakthroughs in key application areas of deep learning such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision. There is emerging evidence that scale may be a key ingredient in scientific deep learning, but the importance of physical priors in scientific domains makes the strategies and benefits of scaling uncertain.

[More to come ...]