Re: Air, Fire, Earth, and Water

From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Sat Mar 03 2001 - 09:23:52 MST


At 7:11pm +0100 2/27/01, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>The classical four elements fit well with the states of matter:
>earth=solid, water=liquid, air=gas, fire=plasma. But now we have many
>more states than four: Einstein-Bose condensates, superfluids,
>degenerate matter, nuclear matter, quark matter and whatnot. Can we
>come up with equally poetic symbols for them, or are they by their
>nature outside the realm of everyday experience (until everyday life
>starts involving neutronium toolkits?).

We already did this with quarks: spinning, charmed, up, down,
strange, etc. I think we will always interpret complicated concepts
with simplified words.

-- 
Harvey Newstrom <http://HarveyNewstrom.com>



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