Even though scientific instruments at the time couldn't prove it, Faraday knew this light scattering was because of gold particles within the fluid. This mixture of chemicals and gold, called a colloid, had the ability to scatter light shone in its direction.

While washing the gold in these chemicals, Faraday noticed that the action produced a faint ruby colored fluid. There wasn't machinery in existence at the time that could make films of gold that small, so Faraday had to use chemicals. Studying the properties of light and matter, Faraday was determined to make gold thin enough that it would be transparent to light.

In 1856, the legendary British scientist Michael Faraday was studying thin sheets of gold leaf. But that doesn't mean there's not a whole lot more beneath the surface. Under standard conditions on Earth, solids, liquids and gasses are the vast majority of what a person will experience in life. Liquid crystals, which make up the visual components of most electronic displays, have elements of both liquids and crystal structures, as anyone who has ever pushed the screen of their calculator can confirm. Solids hold a definite shape without a container, liquids conform to the shape of their container, and gases not only conform to a container, but also expand to fill it.Īnd there's variety amidst these three: A crystalline solid, for example, has all its atoms lined up in exactly the precise order in perfect symmetry, while a quasicrystal solid fills all its space without the tightly regulated structure. After all, during our daily lives we encounter some variety of solids, liquids and gases. Before scientists discovered the new state of matter last week, we were basically all used to just three states of matter.

What are the three states of matter