tablet pc

this thing is so freaking cool. i got to play around with one a few weeks ago.... its awesome....

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/tabletpc/

That looks so cool!

::stops breathing for a few seconds with eyes wide open::

WOW! That is great. I like the three forms it can take (like the three states of matter. Although I think there is four now).

--Garfield

5 states of matter

> 5 states of matter

Really? Is the 5th new? I think I heard about that. These are the four that I know:

-Gas
-Liquid
-Solid
-Liquid crystal

What's the 5th?

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Did anybody see a price for that tablet PC? That is perfect. I bet it is real expensive, though.

--Garfield

Proper states of matter:

Plasma
Gas
Liquid
Solid
Bose-Einstein Condensate

My chem teacher says that she never heard of plasma and that she always called it liquid crystal. Are these two different things? And yes, I heard about that new one. How many more do you think there are going to be? Hard to tell.

--Garfield

>My chem teacher says that she never heard of plasma and that she always called it liquid crystal. Are these two different things? <

Plasma is the state of the moloclues inside a florasant light when it is on.

Firstly, ask you physics teacher, not your chemistry teacher.

Then briefly plasma is what you get if you carry on heating beyond gases with ionisation and such like but still with bulk properties ie is a form of matter

There are unlikely to be anymore. Bose Einstein staes only happens at very low temperatures, ie approaching absolute zero but is the effect you see in super fluids and super conductivity.

Hotter than plasma, erm, trying to remember my physics degree here, you could provide enough further energy to allow nucler fusion to occur, then you could provide enough energy to start breaking down nuclei into protons and neutrons, eventually you could get to the Quark-Gluon Plasma type level but that's as yet unproved.

Look at some stuff on Stellar Physics, Big Band theory and the early universe to get the best ideas of what happens as you heat stuff up.

> Plasma is the state of the moloclues inside a florasant light when it is on.
Oh.

But have you heard of liquid crystal?

--Garfield

I HIT 700!

Yes, LC is the really heard to describe phenomena than can sometimes occur between Liquid and crysalline structures. Didn't know that it had recieved a seperate and distinct state status

Most LC have the molecules mostly fixed in position, but they're free to rotate and align themselves over more preferable directions, some of them have funky polarization properties and respond to EM stuff and allow people to make LCDS and mode rings and things.