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). 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. 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.

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. 1648 – Jan Baptist van Helmont coins the term gas. c. 1660 – Otto von Guericke carries experiment to demonstrate the artificial formation of fog. 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.

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. 1756 – William Cullen provides the first demonstration of artificial refrigeration. 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.

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. 1823 – Systematic studies of the liquefaction of gases by Michael Faraday. He removes the distinction between vapour and gas. 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. 1834 – Émile Clapeyron works out his version of the Clausius–Clapeyron relation. 1850 – Rudolf Clausius reformulates the Clausius–Clayperon relation. 1861 – Dmitri Mendeleev establishes the critical temperature, he calls de la Tour point, the absolute boiling point. 1869 – Thomas Andrews studies of liquefaction of gases. He standardizes and coins the term critical point, critical temperature and critical pressure. 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". See also his phase rule published in "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances" paper. 1879 William Crookes first identifies plasma in laboratory 1881 – John Aitken demonstrate that in fog, water condenses on particles in air. He also establishes the dew point. 1888–1889 – Crystalline optical properties of liquid crystals and their ability to flow are first described by Friedrich Reinitzer and confirmed by Otto Lehmann. 1887 – Floris Osmond introduces the different names for the phases of steel. 1895 – Pierre Curie discovers that induced magnetization is proportional to magnetic field strength

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 – Peter Debye derives the law for the low temperature heat capacity of a nonmetallic solid 1912 – Percy Williams Bridgman, systematic study of the phases of ice. He find ice VI, V and VI. 1919 – Gustav Heinrich Tammann predicts an order-disorder transition in metal alloys at low temperature. 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 1986 – Karl Alexander Müller and Georg Bednorz discover high-temperature superconductivity 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