Timeline of states of matter and phase transitions

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).^[1]
• 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.^[2]
• c. 77 AD – Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, concludes that clouds are formed by the condensation of air.^[2]
• c. 439 AD – Proclus in his Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, categorizes the four elements using three binary qualities sharp/blunt, subtle/dense and mobile/inmobile.^[3]

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.^[4]
• 1260 – First detailed description of snowflakes by Albertus Magnus.^[5]
• 1471 – Alchemist George Ripley describes 12 main alchemical processes including congelation and sublimation.^[6]
• 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).^[7]

• 1637. – René Descartes rejects the hypothesis that water vapor is the same as air.^[2]
• 1648 – Jan Baptist van Helmont coins the term gas.^[8]
• c. 1660 – Otto von Guericke carries experiment to demonstrate the artificial formation of fog.^[2]
• 1669 – Johann Joachim Becher, influenced by Paracelsus, proposes a model in his Physica subterranea, where all matter is composed of the elements air, water and three earths: terra lapidea (vitrieous earth) related to its fusibility, terra fluida (mercurial earth) contributing to fluidity and volatility, and terra pinguis (fatty earth) related to combustibility and flammability.^[9]

18th century

• 1724 – Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit discovers supercooling, while developing the Fahrenheit scale.^[10]
• 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).^[11]
• 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.^[12]
• 1751 – Charles Le Roy describes clouds as suspension of water.^[2]
• 1756 – William Cullen provides the first demonstration of artificial refrigeration.^[13]
• 1762 – Joseph Black discovers latent heat.^[14]
• 1780 – Antoine Lavoisier postulates three states of matter: solids, liquids and vapors.^[15][16]
• 1784 – Liquefaction of sulfur dioxide by compression and cooling by Jean-François Clouet and Gaspard Monge.^[15]

19th century

• 1822 – Charles Cagniard de la Tour discovers the critical point (called de la Tour point at the time). His experiments with sealed cannons mark the discovery of supercritical fluids.^[15]
• 1823 – Systematic studies of the liquefaction of gases by Michael Faraday.^[16][15] He removes the distinction between vapour an gas.^[15]
• 1824 – Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot publishes Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, introducing the earliest version of Clausius–Clapeyron relation which characterizes the transition between two phases of matter.^[17]
• 1834 – Émile Clapeyron works out his version of the Clausius–Clapeyron relation.^[18]
• 1850 – Rudolf Clausius reformulates the Clausius–Clayperon relation.^[18]
• 1861 – Dmitri Mendeleev establishes the critical temperature, he calls de la Tour point, the absolute boiling point.^[15]
• 1869 – Thomas Andrews studies of liquefaction of gases. He standardizes and coins the term critical point, critical temperature and critical pressure.^[16][15][19] He also discovers critical opalescence.^[20]
• 1868 – Dmitry Chernov introduces the critical points of steel.^[21]
• 1873 – James Thomson coins the term triple point of water.^[22]
• 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.^[23]
• 1875 –James Clerk Maxwell introduces his Maxwell construction for state transitions.^[24]
• 1875-1876 – Josiah Willard Gibbs introduces the concept of "phase".^[21] See also his phase rule published in "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances" paper.
• 1879 – William Crookes first identifies plasma in laboratory^[25]
• 1881 – John Aitken demonstrate that in fog, water condenses on particles in air. He also establishes the dew point.^[2]
• 1888–1889 – Crystalline optical properties of liquid crystals and their ability to flow are first described by Friedrich Reinitzer and confirmed by Otto Lehmann.^[26]
• 1887 – Floris Osmond introduces the different names for the phases of steel.^[21]
• 1895 – Pierre Curie discovers that induced magnetization is proportional to magnetic field strength^[27]

20th century

• 1900 – Gustav Heinrich Tammann discovers the phases of ice: ice II and ice III.^[28]
• 1911 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discloses his research on superconductivity^[29]
• 1908 – Marian Smoluchowski explains critical opalescence with fluctuations of density.^[20]
• 1912 – Peter Debye derives the T³ law for the low temperature heat capacity of a nonmetallic solid^[30]
• 1912 – Percy Williams Bridgman, systematic study of the phases of ice. He find ice VI, V and VI.^[28]
• 1919 – Gustav Heinrich Tammann predicts an order-disorder transition in metal alloys at low temperature.^[31]
• 1924–1925 – Bose–Einstein condensate was first predicted, generally, by Albert Einstein^[32]
• 1925 – Ernst Ising presents the solution to the one-dimensional Ising model^[33]
• 1928 – Felix Bloch applies quantum mechanics to electrons in crystal lattices, establishing the quantum theory of solids^[34]
• 1929 – Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac ^{[citation needed]} and Werner Karl Heisenberg develop the quantum theory of ferromagnetism^[35]
• 1932 – Louis Eugène Félix Néel discovers antiferromagnetism^[36]
• 1933 – Paul Ehrenfest classifies the general types of phases transitions.^[37]
• 1933 – Walther Meissner and Robert Ochsenfeld discover perfect superconducting diamagnetism^[38]
• 1933 – Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky propose the existence of neutron stars, made of neutronium.^[39]
• 1933–1937 – Lev Landau develops the Landau theory of phase transitions^[40]
• 1935 – Lev Shubnikov discovers type-II superconductivity.^[41]
• 1936 – Ukichiro Nakaya makes extensive studies of snow formation. He creates the first artificial snowflakes.^[42]
• 1937 – Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa and John Frank Allen/Don Misener discover superfluidity^[43][44]
• 1937 – Jan Hendrik de Boer and Evert Verwey, and independently Nevill Mott develop the theory of metal–insulator transition and Mott transition.^[45]
• 1941 – Landau explains superfluidity^[46][47]
• 1942 – Hannes Alfvén predicts magnetohydrodynamic waves in plasmas^[48]
• 1944 – Lars Onsager publishes the exact solution to the two-dimensional Ising model^[49]
• 1950 – Landau and Vitaly Ginzburg develop Ginzburg–Landau theory
• 1957 – John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and Robert Schrieffer develop the BCS theory of superconductivity^[50][51]
• 1957 – Landau develops the theory of Fermi liquid^[52]
• 1959 – Philip Warren Anderson predicts localization in disordered systems^[53]
• 1972 – Douglas Osheroff, Robert C. Richardson, and David M. Lee discover that helium-3 can become a superfluid^[54]
• 1974 – Kenneth G. Wilson develops the renormalization group technique for treating phase transitions^[55]
• 1980 – Klaus von Klitzing discovers the quantum Hall effect^[56]
• 1982 – Horst L. Störmer and Daniel C. Tsui discover the fractional quantum Hall effect^[57]
• 1983 – Robert B. Laughlin explains the fractional quantum Hall effect^[57]
• 1986 – Karl Alexander Müller and Georg Bednorz discover high-temperature superconductivity^[58]
• 1995 – Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman produce the first Bose–Einstein condensate using rubidium atoms^[59]
• 1997 – Steven T. Bramwell and Mark J. Harris team find a compound that behaves as spin ice at low temperatures.^[60]

21st century

• 2000 – CERN announced quark-gluon plasma, a new phase of matter.^[61]
• 2024 –Altermagnetism is discovered.^[62]

See also

• List of states of matter