This is a timeline of states of matter and phase transitions, specifically discoveries related to either of these topics.

Timeline

Antiquity

  • c. 450 BC – Empedocles introduces the four classical element (earth, water, air, fire).
  • c. 340 BC – Aristotle in his work Meteorology, expand on the classical elements and describes the water cycle. His cycle includes evaporation of water, formation of clouds, snow and rain.
  • c. 77 AD – Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, concludes that clouds are formed by the condensation of air.

Before 18th century

  • 7th century – Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber) proposes four primary qualities: hotness, coldness, dryness, moistness. The classical elements can hold only two of these qualities. Metals internal qualities are different from their external qualities.
  • 1260 – First detailed description of snowflakes by Albertus Magnus.
  • 1471 – Alchemist George Ripley describes 12 main alchemical processes including congelation and sublimation.
  • 1530 – Alchemist Paracelsus proposes his theory of tria prima were primary elements being: a combustible element (sulfur), a liquid changeable element (mercury) and solid element (salt).
  • 1637. – René Descartes rejects the hypothesis that water vapor is the same as air.
  • c. 1660 – Otto von Guericke carries experiment to demonstrate the artificial formation of fog.

18th century

  • 1724 – Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit discovers supercooling, while developing the Fahrenheit scale.
  • 1730 – René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur develops the Réaumur scale, calibrated between the freezing point (0°R) and the boiling point of water (80°R).
  • 1742 – Anders Celsius develops the Celsius scale, calibrated where its 0°C are defined at the freezing point of water and 100°C at the boiling point of water.
  • 1751 – Charles Le Roy describes clouds as suspension of water.
  • 1762 – Joseph Black discovers latent heat.
  • 1780 – Antoine Lavoisier postulates three states of matter: solids, liquids and vapors.
  • 1784 – Liquefaction of sulfur dioxide by compression and cooling by Jean-François Clouet and Gaspard Monge.
  • 1834 – Émile Clapeyron works out his version of the Clausius–Clapeyron relation.
  • 1861 – Dmitri Mendeleev establishes the critical temperature, he calls de la Tour point, the absolute boiling point. He also discovers critical opalescence.
  • 1868 – Dmitry Chernov introduces the critical points of steel.
  • 1873 – James Thomson coins the term triple point of water.
  • 1873 –Johannes Diderik van der Waals thesis. He explains that water-vapour transition by introducing van der Waals equation and the van der Waals force.
  • 1875 –James Clerk Maxwell introduces his Maxwell construction for state transitions.
  • 1875-1876 – Josiah Willard Gibbs introduces the concept of "phase".
  • 1881 – John Aitken demonstrate that in fog, water condenses on particles in air. He also establishes the dew point.
  • 1887 – Floris Osmond introduces the different names for the phases of steel.

20th century

  • 1900 – Gustav Heinrich Tammann discovers the phases of ice: ice II and ice III.
  • 1911 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discloses his research on superconductivity
  • 1908 – Marian Smoluchowski explains critical opalescence with fluctuations of density.
  • 1912 – Percy Williams Bridgman, systematic study of the phases of ice. He find ice VI, V and VI.
  • 19241925 Bose–Einstein condensate was first predicted, generally, by Albert Einstein
  • 1925 – Ernst Ising presents the solution to the one-dimensional Ising model
  • 1928 – Felix Bloch applies quantum mechanics to electrons in crystal lattices, establishing the quantum theory of solids
  • 1929 – Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac and Werner Karl Heisenberg develop the quantum theory of ferromagnetism
  • 1932 – Louis Eugène Félix Néel discovers antiferromagnetism
  • 1933 – Paul Ehrenfest classifies the general types of phases transitions.
  • 1933 – Walther Meissner and Robert Ochsenfeld discover perfect superconducting diamagnetism
  • 1933 – Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky propose the existence of neutron stars, made of neutronium.
  • 1933–1937 – Lev Landau develops the Landau theory of phase transitions
  • 1935 – Lev Shubnikov discovers type-II superconductivity.
  • 1936 – Ukichiro Nakaya makes extensive studies of snow formation. He creates the first artificial snowflakes.
  • 1937 – Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa and John Frank Allen/Don Misener discover superfluidity
  • 1937 – Jan Hendrik de Boer and Evert Verwey, and independently Nevill Mott develop the theory of metal–insulator transition and Mott transition.
  • 1941 – Landau explains superfluidity
  • 1942 – Hannes Alfvén predicts magnetohydrodynamic waves in plasmas
  • 1944 – Lars Onsager publishes the exact solution to the two-dimensional Ising model
  • 1950 – Landau and Vitaly Ginzburg develop Ginzburg–Landau theory
  • 1957 – John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and Robert Schrieffer develop the BCS theory of superconductivity
  • 1957 – Landau develops the theory of Fermi liquid
  • 1958 –John W. Cahn and John E. Hilliard develop the mathematical treatment of phase separation, known as Cahn–Hilliard equation.
  • 1959 – Philip Warren Anderson predicts localization in disordered systems
  • 1972 – Douglas Osheroff, Robert C. Richardson, and David M. Lee discover that helium-3 can become a superfluid
  • 1974 – Kenneth G. Wilson develops the renormalization group technique for treating phase transitions
  • 1980 – Klaus von Klitzing discovers the quantum Hall effect
  • 1982 – Horst L. Störmer and Daniel C. Tsui discover the fractional quantum Hall effect
  • 1983 – Robert B. Laughlin explains the fractional quantum Hall effect
  • 1995 – Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman produce the first Bose–Einstein condensate using rubidium atoms
  • 1997 – Steven T. Bramwell and Mark J. Harris team find a compound that behaves as spin ice at low temperatures.

21st century

  • 2000 – CERN announced quark-gluon plasma, a new phase of matter.
  • 2024 –Altermagnetism is discovered.

See also

  • List of states of matter

References