The 5th state of Matter

We all know the 4 instances in which we can find matter: solid, liquid, gas and plasma. This is a schematic found on Wikipedia's site that represents the relations between these 4 standard and more known states in which matter is found through out the universe. There are some less known stats in which matter resides but they are found only in very low quantities and are man-made (Liquid crystal states, Superconductors and Superfluids).
These states are defined by the position and relative closeness between atoms/ions and electrons.


But i want to talk about a totally different state which matter takes and has been observed exclusively on our planet. I am talking about LIFE. Life is a very interesting phenomenon that can be manifested in an almost infinite number of ways and even if it has been studied since the human mind started to think, it still is one of the notions that doesn't has a clear definition.

When i say "life" what do most of you think about ?


Well this is life as how many of us see it. But why isn't an artificial intelligence some other sort of life manifestation ? Just because man made it ? What is the boundary between living and non-living things ? And more importantly who decides what is alive and what is not. Well the answer to the last question is simple. WE decide that (we as in humans), because we think that we know a lot of things and because it seems that we're the only ones who can make that judgment we do it regardless if it's correct or not.
I like to think that everything that surrounds us is alive in one way or the other. I think that the whole Universe is alive as it's in constant motion and ever changing and evolving. Look at all the stars that die just to give birth to other planets and stars. We are all made from stardust and that is what we'll become after we close our eyes for the last time. If we think as life as the 5th state of mater there there is just a problem of time, till the strings of life will intertwine. Humans have the power to think about their place in the universe for only a few thousand years which represents an infinitely small period of time from an universal point of view. So just because we are unable to see past our own condition that doesn't mean that there is nothing else out there. The robot in the movie "the Bicentennial Man" was more alive than most of us humans.

To be continued ...

There was Light

I have first seen the light of this world not long before Chernobyl gave his first toxic breath, but far enough so that it's effects won't reached me till a few months later, and i really hope that i will give my last breath before the light of a candle and not before the light of an Atomic Spark. I will never know if that big event that happened shortly after i was born has changed anything in my life but i know that many many people have been influenced by it more or less. I had some medical problems around that time and doctors blamed the contaminated vegetables but nothing was certain.

What do you think about upon hearing the word "light"? About God? That's too abstract for now. When that word pops in my mind, i think about everything i have seen during my life: all my pens and pencils, all the people i've seen and met, all the cars/planes/bikes/helicopters i've followed with my eyes, about all the animals and plants i've watched, about all the movies and clips that filled my life with joy or sorrow. Light is more than the manifestation of some electromagnetic energy. Light is the giver of life in our little corner of the universe. Who knows how life would have evolved on this piece of rock without light. We can see a lot of strange creatures in deep caves and oceans, stranger than everything that lives closer to or into the light. I wonder if the human being would have ever evolved.
But as everything in this world, light can be used in 2 ways ... to create or to destroy. Too much of anything is a bad thing for a living being :) , and so exposure to too much light will lead to skin cancers and blindness and eventually death. And a concentrated beam of light can do even more than that. It can destroy a lot harder materials than skin, like steel.

In the beginnig ...

Before creating this "blog" i was full of ideas and excitement, but as soon as i found myself in front of the blank page everything went, well ... blank and lost all my inspiration. But as a Chinese proverb says: "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step", i tried to recreate my one thousand "first" step, so here we go...