The heart of the matter (there's three kinds).

First of all, I’m not a huge Eagles fan. The bird’s fine, and the Philadelphia sports team is fine, and I guess it’s fine as a national mascot. But I’m not a giant fan of the ‘70s supergroup led by Glenn Frey and Don Henley. They sold a bunch of albums and got in trouble with some fringe fundamentalists for supposedly recording satanic lyrics backwards on a song or two, but then again, every group in between Led Zeppelin and Stryper got pegged with that during the ‘80s, so no big deal. Point is, I’ve got nothing against the Eagles, I just don’t need to actively listen to anything they recorded again, especially Hotel California and Desperado. However, Don Henley, one of the big boys in the group, did a solo album in 1989 called The End of the Innocence and the closing track was entitled “The Heart of the Matter.” It’s a really good song.

So that’s what this intro is about. I didn’t need the giant paragraph above to talk about Matter as it relates to Earth Science and Physics. I just needed it to explain that it’s also the name of a great song from 1989, and also a 1948 novel by Graham Greene that I haven’t read yet, but intend to, because Shūsaku Endō, the Japanese novelist who wrote Silence was a great admirer of his. Also, I haven’t yet read Endō’s 1966 Silence, but intend to. Perhaps you’ve seen the 2016 adaptation by Martin Scorsese starring Andrew Garfield, Liam Neeson, and Adam Driver.

Or perhaps you haven’t. Regardless, the song by Don Henley called “The Heart of the Matter” is a very good song. Especially for 1989.

But on to…matter.

A very very short short intro to Matter

States of matter

Before we can define matter, I have chosen to define states.

Graphic with text that says "You matter, and there's three kinds"

A state, in this context, is a part or a version of something at a particular point in time. It also implies that there’s more than one of it. For example, it’s not the United State of America. It’s the United States of America.

So the phrase “states of matter” refers to there being more than one state of matter.

Matter

Now I am warmed up, so I shall define matter, in the context of science, without using the dictionary. So here’s the long complicated version:

Matter is what everything is made of.

There. Everything is made of atoms, which are in turn made of subatomic particles which include neutrons and protons, which in turn are made up of sub-subatomic particles called quarks which bind together with gluons, which is sort of like sci-fi glue except it’s real, in theory, but this is almost less-relevant than Don Henley and Graham Greene, so I’m going to reverse course and ask you to forget this sentence. It never happened.

Everything in the universe is made of matter. Now, if you’re a cranky iconoclastic contrarian like some (looking in the mirror), you’re probably thinking “…everything in the universe is made of matter? Literally everything? In this universe? What about other universes? Are there other universes where matter doesn’t matter? Where there is no matter? Where everything is made up of something that isn’t matter?”

I know. I have the same question. But relax. We’re just talking about this universe for today. So let’s agree that everything is made of matter. And there are three states of matter, to the best of my recollection.

Gas

If you’ve ever been in an elevator, pre-COVID, and it started getting smelly, then there’s a few reasons why. There might have been a fuel leak and you’re just getting some fumes coming through, so ideally your stop is coming up soon. Or, it might have been a gas leak from someone’s rear end.

The latter is how I like to explain it to our children. The first state of matter is Gas. When I say “the first state,” I do not mean to imply there is a hierarchy or chronology of the states of matter. This is just the order I talk about them in.

A bunch of smart people I’ve learned from have used water as an example too. Water is way cool because it can exist in (spoiler alert) all three states. When it’s in the state of a gas, it’s called vapor or steam. Go make yourself a cup of coffee right now. Quick. Unless you shouldn’t be having caffeine, which is seriously not good to have in great quantities. You can do hot chocolate instead. See that steam? That’s gas.

And that’s better gas than the gas someone let out of their bottom in the elevator.

Liquid

If you’re in that same elevator, and something starts smelling bad, and then you look on the floor and there’s a brown pool of something gross on the floor, and a beastly young human in diapers who has emitted the leaking substance from their diaper is growling at you, then you know first hand what a liquid is. Or, if you’re in the elevator and some two-year old boy decided he has to pee, sans urinal. That’s a liquid.

Oh yeah, also, water is a liquid. If it’s fairly clean, you can swim or shower in it. If it’s super clean, you can drink it. If it’s not too clean at all, then, uhh, that’s too bad.

I would prefer a liquid that comes as a tall glass of clean, cool water than a brown, smelly pool of diarrhea on an elevator floor. But technically they’re still part of the same state of matter. So those are liquids.

Solid

So you’re in that elevator, and you look down, and that two-year old kid is holding something super gross in their hands and about to rub it on people’s shoes, and you suddenly have the sudden realization that it’s a solid, and that it came out of their diaper, and that your life is not super great at this exact moment.

Also, water can be a solid. You can skate on it if it’s solid enough, like an ice rink in the underrated film Mystery, Alaska. Or you an try skating on a pond even if it’s not solid enough, which is what happened at the beginning of It’s a Wonderful Life, which by the way is one of the darkest and most wonderful films ever.

I would prefer a solid that is something beautiful, like ice crystals or frozen ponds over something not so beautiful, like a young beast pulling poop solids out of their diaper and rubbing it all over.

Summary

So there you go. Everything is made up of Matter. There are three types of Matter. Gas, liquids, and solids. Some substances can change from one state to another, such as water. But they keep their same basic identity and the same number of molecules. Sort of like a Shapeshifter.

In fact, sort of exactly like a Shapeshifter. But that’s another conversation.

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