A Beginner's View of Our Electric Universe - New

56 | Some basic theory that will help
‘Gas’ is the second state of matter. As the temperature of liquid water rises, some of
its molecules will separate off and rise away into the air as water vapour gas.
Sparse molecules of water vapour © author
With no deliberate application of energy, this is what we would consider to be the
normal evaporation of water as it turns into a gas that is lighter than air then drifts
away. We get precisely the same result but much more of it when we deliberately
heat water up so that it evaporates rapidly, like when we raise its temperature to
boiling point at sea level of 100˚C and it turns into steam.
During this process, the molecules give up their relationships with each other to
become a thinly dispersed molecular gas where the individual molecules float about
in a random fashion. Beyond this process we can, through special means, separate
the individual water molecules into their oxygen and hydrogen component gases.
Atoms of hydrogen and oxygen separated © author
For the level of understanding we want to achieve, this process of increasing or reducing the energy that
electrons have in order to bring about the various gas, liquid and solid states, can be considered as the same
process that applies to all types of matter. (Note: Some solid combinations of matter take shortcuts and do not
appear to work like this - an obvious example is wood - you cannot heat wood and produce liquid before a gas, it
breaks down and goes initially to other solid matter and gases.) For our overall discussion, however, it is useful
to accept for now that at large structure levels, where we have combinations of molecules and elements that
make up all physical things in our environment, the basic conversion rules as described here will apply. Here is
another example ... Think about steel turning to a liquid form when heated to its melting point then separating
into atoms of the gases Iron, Carbon, Manganese, Phosphorous, Sulphur and Silicon as the temperature is
increased even further. In a broad sense, when considering matter, it all seems to come down to various amounts
of energy being present at the molecular and elemental bonding levels that gives us the range of materials in
our world with which we are familiar - the air we breathe, the water we swim in, and the land we walk on - and
every other physical thing you can think of as well.
Most gases, liquids and solids share an additionally important property, this being that they have electrons
which to some extent can freely move about or be easily coaxed into doing so. If an appropriate force is applied
collectively to these free electrons to make them move in the same direction, then this can be considered as
producing (or ‘inducing’ being the more correct word to use) an electric current to flow in that particular form
of matter. The point here is that all forms of matter can theoretically conduct an electric current; it just depends