I was taught, and I have no reason not to believe, that there are three forms of matter. There are solids, there are liquids, and there are gases. But nowadays I'm expected to believe that there are at least two other forms of matter. No matter how I frazzle my brain trying to imagine what in the world can exist that isn't a solid, a liquid or a gas, I make no headway. But then I think-- suppose I happened to live in a world in which there were only solids and gases -- where all solids, when heated, immediately sublimed into gases? Suppose there was no ice made of water-- only substances such as dry ice which, it will be remembered, turns directly into carbon dioxide when warmed. In such a world, it would have been beyond my conceptual ability to conceive of matter other than the two forms with which I was familiar. Liquids would have been unimaginable. I can only conclude that other forms of matter are definitely possible; it's just that I myself can't imagine them.
Similarly, there are the familiar colors of the visible spectrum: red, orange yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. These are the only colors (well, except for brown, and black, and white). But it's well known that birds see colors that humans (who apparently lost some color-sensitive cells during the course of evolution) cannot detect. There are infra-red and ultra-violet colors to which birds respond but that humans are not equipped to perceive. What do these colors look like? I can't possibly imagine, although I dearly wish that I could. An analogy: let's say that we humans were constructed in such a way that we could see only the colors of the spectrum that lie between yellow and blue; there would be no way that we could imagine red or orange, even if we knew that other creatures detected those portions of the spectrum. We would live in a world that had been drained of color. But, in fact, compared to the birds, we do live in a color-attenuated universe. Moreover, there's no way that we can imagine what it is that we're missing.
I wonder also about bats. Bats are blind but they navigate very precisely by echolocation, which is nothing more than very sophisticated radar. They emit high-pitched squeals, and they process the echoes of these emissions in a manner that is so precise that they can catch mosquitoes on the wing. But what is in their minds? Does the radar create a picture -- perhaps something like a three-dimensional black-and-white movie? Or more likely, is something created in the bat brain that only a bat will ever know and that humans will never, ever be able to imagine. And what about whales, who are not blind as bats but both see and also gather information by sonar. What's it's like being a whale?
We're limited by the evolved architecture of our brains. We can't imagine what we can't imagine. We can, however, know that there are phenomena that we can't imagine -- which is something, I guess, but all-in-all a rather paltry compensation.
(Plasma and the Einstein-Bose condensate, sometimes termed alternative forms of matter, are not so much alternatives to solid, liquid, and gas as they are states of the atoms themselves: plasma amounts to, if I understand what I've read, atoms stripped of their electrons, while the EBC is a bunch of atoms that don't form themselves into a lattice as they would in solids. They just lie there, a frigid clump, each unrelated to the other except by proximity.)
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