TOO FAST!
A much used comeback line in the days of the old style Minstrel Show used to be - in explaining one's lassitude - to proclaim: “The faster I go ahead, the behinder I get!”
I feel the same way when I meet with all the new knowledge we are supposed to absorb. There are entire armies of technical snoopers out there discovering things we should have thought about a hundred years ago.
With every announcement of a discovery they have just made ...proclamations which are supposed to keep me up with our times, I tend to fall back another notch or so into the century long gone.
For instance, take this matter of “matter”.
I have been completely comfortable with the idea that there were three types of matter. That's what we were taught in the lower grades at school. There were “Solids”. Right? Then, we had another form called “Liquids”, as I recall, and a third type of matter - entirely different from the other two - which we were to call “Gases.” All that, I grasped and understood. “No sweat”, we say which shows how natural and effortless the acquisition of knowledge is supposed to be.
Now, however, my fact-finding friends at NASA tell we there are “at least” - as they put it – six forms of matter. One was added sometime ago, but no one told me about it being so different. The other two are ones I am going to be working on for some time. It does not help one little bit when NASA scribblers start their sentence to me with the words: “Most second graders know...” But, I will go along with their thinking that insists that the number four form of matter is that which we call “plasma.” They cite the sun as being a good example. It ls not a solid, it's not a liquid and it's not a gas even though it may seem to be likeanyhor allof them at times. Plasma is, technically, that state which happens when the atoms have their ions and elections are ripped apart. NASA also says, quite confidently, that the rest of the universe is also made of the same stuff.
The fifth an sixth types of matter are still in the alphabet stage of “discovery”. The one is called BEC or the Bose-Einstein condensate. It was discovered in 1995 and it appears only when you freeze particles called “bosoms” to ultra-low temperatures.
The very latest matter is called “fermionic condensates”. I you just happen to “freeze half a million atoms of potassium-40 atoms to less than a millionth of a degree of absolute zero.” you mayget some of it.
I don't think your local lumber yard is going to be getting in sizable stocks of any of these for some time, so be content with the old threesome for a little while lonmger - maybe like a century, or so. We can all think “plasma”now-and-then to show we are not completely out-of- date.
A.L.M. February 14 , 2004 [c511wds]
