Are there more than three states of matter?
542537
I would think there may be as many as six. I asked a question on here a few months ago, trying to find out if it were possible for matter to have mass but not take up space and vice versa. I think it's completely possible and if it is, I like to call it inverse matter. That would be the 6th state of matter and might be descriptive of "black holes".
944520
Water can exist in three different forms, known as States. These states refer to the form that water takes depending on what is happening to the water molecules. Water molecules change from one state to another when heat energy is added or lost. The three states of water are Liquid (flowing water), Gas (steam), and Solid (ice).\n\nGas State\n\n    The bond between the hydrogen and oxygen that form the water molecules is a weak attraction.\nWhen water is heated to boiling, and steam begins to form, the molecules separate and are no longer attached. This causes a gas to form. In this gaseous state, the water molecules have been heated by energy and are moving very fast. \n\n    Water in the form of gas also forms when it Evaporates from a liquid . This occurs in the Water Cycle as oceans, seas, lakes, and smaller bodies of liquid water evaporate in the heat of the sun.
62664
Kinetic, potential, nuclear, chemical and electrical.
369216
matter is neither created nor destroyed
1178524
The first two were solved.\n\nThere hasn't been a third one yet.
957050
all things have a solid liquid and gas state. it just depends on the temperature.
47269
Matter is anything that has Mass and takes up space.  The general properties of matter are mass, weight, volume and density.   They are considered physical properties.\n\nLook around you and you will see matter.  Air is matter because it takes up space.  Heat and light does not have mass or takes up space, so it is not matter.  \n\nScientists have separated matter into states or phases.  Prior to 1985 there were 4 states or phases, today we have 5 states or phases.  Each of these phases certain properties associated with each phases.  Matter can be changed from one state or phase to another phase by energy.  There are five types of phase changes.
1115519
Its matter. But what is matter. String theory suggest that all matter is made up of vibrating string and the different vibrations causes different characteristics in matter.
187737
Actually there are four fundamental forces.  There are two kinds of nuclear force, strong and weak.  Also don't forget magnetism, you should say the electromagnetic force instead of electrostatic only.  Anyway, nobody knows the answer to this question yet.  It is still one of the outstanding questions in physics.  So have fun thinking about it, and see if you can come up with the answer.
154823
Strickly speaking there are four fundamental forces: electromagnetic, gravity, the strong nuclear, and the weak nuclear force.\n\nOn the other hand, it has been shown that the electromagnetic and weak forces are two aspects of the same thing - sort of like how ice and water are two aspects of the same thing. And it has been shown that this electroweak force is the same as the strong nuclear force.\n\nIn other words, those three forces are really one force that we observe as different aspects.\n\nGravity has yet to be connected. String theories are one way being pursued to try and link all four forces together. I ten to think, and most physics people do, that gravity is related. \n\nBut if it isn't then we have : electroweak-strong and gravity as the two forces.
1156566
1) Solid\n2) Liquid\n3) Gas\n4) Plasmas: Normal and quark-gluon\n5) Strange Matter\n6) Liquid Crystals\n7) Supersolids and superfluids\n8) Magnetic: Paramagnetic and ferromagnetic\n9) Bose-Einstein Condensates
360394
A more generic term for the components of an atom is "sub-atomic particles."  I think that's the answer you're looking for.
214575
It is true that nobody knows. It is false that theories on the origin of matter are wild speculations. See an earlier post I did today on an almost identical question for a reasonable theory for the origin of matter out of nothing.\n\nIn short, the fact is that matter appears out of nowhere all the time. There's is no reason to think it could not do a slightly more extreme version of the same thing if the vacuum state were changed a little bit, ie. its energy density was increased.
953114
Solid,liquid and gas.
796505
A ton. Let's take everyday physics first: The answer depends very much on how you define a state of matter. Glas is a good example: It feels like a solid, but it is not made up of crystals with atoms placed in a regular array like in a salt crystal and most other solid states. The atoms are randomly spread around more like in a liquid (in fact during many years a glass window will get thicker at the bottom than at the top, because glass is really a kind of liquid - a solid liquid if you wish). So you can call glass a differnent state if you wish.\n\nNow let's go to extremes:\nThe plasma state arises when the temperature gets so high that atoms cannot bind the electrons any more (so electrons and nuclei are floating freely around among each other). If you go to really really extremely high particle energies (so high that even modern particle accelerators can only barely make it) also the nuclei will finally be decomposed into constituents called quarks and gluons creating a new state called a quark-gluon plasma. More info:\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_gluon_plasma\n\nIf you go to very very low temperatures quantum mechanical features of atoms begin to become important and a lot of new, interesting states of matter emerge (quantum mechanics is the physical laws valid on the atomic level. It is very different from Newtons laws). For instance liquid helium - when cooled below a critical point (which is about 2 K) - changes it state from a normal liquid to a so called superfluid liquid which among a lot of other interesting features does not experience any frictional forces (so it can crawl over the walls of a cup for instance). What goes on is that all the atoms (or at least many of them) unify and moves together - in a sense the collection of atoms behaves like it was only one atom. Such a collection of atoms behaving almost like a single atom is called a Bose-Einstein Condensate and it is clearly a new state of matter. Nowadays Bose-Einstein condensates of many different kind of atoms can be created in a controlled manner in modern laser laboratories. The Nobel prize in physics in 2001 was awarded for the first realization of this, a lot of information can be found on\nhttp://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2001\nIt is a similar phenomena that leads to superconductivity in some materials at very low temperatures, by the way. A lot of modern research deals with understanding exotic quantum states of matter and create them in laboratories.\nI hope the answer helps. I have tried to make it as understandable as possible, but quantum states of matter is a difficult topic.
566511
Electrons, which are a Fermion particles, obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle. This means in a system there can never be 2 identical fermions (in this case no 2 electrons in an atom) that occupy the same quantum state. This is different to Bosons (photons for example) where any number of bosons can occupy the same quantum state.\n\nIn a bit more depth:\nThe Pauli exclusion principle plays a profound role in a huge number of physical phenomena. One of the most important, it results in "rigidness" or "stiffness" of fermions as contrast to bosons - impossibility to squeeze identical fermions into each other - thus in "rigidness" of ordinary matter (Young and bulk moduli of solids are direct consequences of Pauli principle). Another consequence is the elaborate electron shell structure of atoms and of the way atoms share electron(s) - thus variety of chemical elements and of their combinations (chemistry). (An electrically neutral atom contains bound electrons equal in number to the protons in the nucleus. Since electrons are fermions, the Pauli exclusion principle forbids them from occupying the same quantum state, so electrons have to "pile on top of each other" in atom).\n\nFor example, consider a neutral helium atom, which has two bound electrons. Both of these electrons can occupy the lowest-energy (1s) states by acquiring opposite spin. This does not violate the Pauli principle because spin is part of the quantum state of the electron, so the two electrons are occupying different quantum states. However, the spin can take only two different values (or eigenvalues). In a lithium atom, which contains three bound electrons, the third electron cannot fit into a 1s state, and has to occupy one of the higher-energy 2s states instead. Similarly, successive elements produce successively higher-energy shells. The chemical properties of an element largely depend on the number of electrons in the outermost shell, which gives rise to the periodic table of the elements.\n\nAstronomy provides another spectacular demonstrations of this effect, in the form of white dwarf stars and neutron stars. In both types of objects, the usual atomic structures are disrupted by large gravitational forces, leaving the constituents supported only by a "degeneracy pressure" produced by the Pauli exclusion principle. This exotic form of matter is known as degenerate matter. In white dwarfs, the atoms are held apart by the degeneracy pressure of the electrons. In neutron stars, which exhibit even larger gravitational forces, the electrons have merged with the protons to form neutrons, which produce a larger degeneracy pressure. Neutrons are the most "rigid" objects known - their Young modulus (or more accurate, bulk modulus) is 20 orders of magnitude larger than that of diamond.\n\nAnother physical phenomenon for which the Pauli principle is responsible is ferromagnetism, in which the exclusion effect results in exchange energy that induces neighboring electron spins to align (whereas classically they would anti-align).
124965
That is another one of those "it depends" questions.\n\nSolid, liquid, and gas are the phases know since antiquity.  More recently, plasma has been included in the list.\n\nHowever, there are a number of other "conditions" matter can take, that some scientists consider to be phases, including:\n\nBose-Einstein condensates\nneutronium\nstrange matter\nquark-gluon plasmas\nsuperfluids\n\nAnd the list goes on.  Some of these are theoretical, some can be produced in a laboratory.  And more are being proposed/discovered all the time.\n\nSo, there is no "official" number for phases of matter, because definitions for phases of matter vary.