Is Fire or Electricity Considered a State of Matter?

  • Context: High School 
  • Thread starter Thread starter ubergewehr273
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Doubt Matter States
Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
3 replies · 2K views
ubergewehr273
Messages
139
Reaction score
5
Is there any state of matter for fire or electricity ?
If yes, then what is the state of matter ?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Matterwave said:
Fire is a plasma, and electricity is the motion of electrons, it's not a "state".

"Fire" is mostly neutral gas molecules, the fire in a fireplace is gas with suspended luminescent particles. A flame on a gas stove is a mixture of stable and reactive gas-phase species (the blue color comes from emission from C2 and CH molecules). Most of the components of a flame are neutral species. There are some ionized species, but these are in very low concentration.
 
For the most part, fire is is just gas that's red-hot.
If you get a gas really really incredibly hot it will turn into a plasma. You can tell the difference depending on how it reacts to light and magnetism. (a plasma is electrically conducting, and so is opaque, though being red hot anyway, this would be hard to test by trying to look through it (a laser might be useful, though)). You can bend plasma with magnetic fields, too.

There are many states of matter, but there are a few well recognized phases of matter.

There's the usual solid, liquid, and gas
But there's also (on the hot end), ordinary plasmas (when electrons are no longer bound to nuclei), and quark-gluon plasmas (when protons, neutrons, and their constituents are no longer bound together as nuclei)
On the cold end, there are Bose-Einstein condensates. These are gases so cold that the individual atoms all share the same ground state, and act as though they are described by one wavefunction like a giant atom.

As far as electricity goes, you can describe it at least theoretically as a gas of particles moving through an idealized African rainstick.
 
Last edited: