For more than a century, schoolbook physics has divided matter into neat categories like solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. A ...

Physicists are now watching matter behave in a way that defies everyday intuition, with atoms and even light itself arranging ...

Solids, liquids and gases. In a solid like this brick, the particles are regularly arranged touching their neighbours and move only by vibrating. This explains why solids have a fixed shape. In a ...

Why can you stand on a glacier but not the ocean? The answer seems simple enough: Liquids flow. Solids don’t. The atoms in liquids can slosh around. In solids, they fall lockstep into a crystal ...

Everything around you - and even your body - is made up of the three phases of matter. Let's find out more. The whole world and everything we can see around us is made up of matter. Matter can be ...

Chemically, substances are classified into three types, solids, liquids and gases, but if it is said to classify a swinging fire as one of these three, you should be troubled by the answer. What on ...

Listen to the full series on BBC Sounds. Individual particles do not have the same properties as the bulk substance. The physical properties are due to the arrangement and movement of all the ...

Glass and other strange materials have long confounded textbook definitions of what it means to be solid. Now, two groups of physicists propose a new solution to the riddle. The answer seems simple ...