Hello and meow to my readers! It’s Cosmo here, inviting you to the Special STEAM Story Hour on Tuesday, February 6 at 6:30 p.m. at the Grand County Public Library. We’ll listen to a story and then do experiments and art exploring this month’s theme: States of Matter!
What is matter, anyway? Everything around us is made up of matter, even cats. Even you! But not all matter is the same. Most of the matter we can see is solid, liquid, gas, or plasma.
Generally speaking, solids have a fixed shape, mass, and volume, like my dry cat food which only loses mass and volume when I eat it.
Liquids have a fixed volume, but not a fixed shape, so they can take the shape of whatever container you pour them into, like when the librarians refill the water in my dish.
Gases meanwhile lack both volume and shape; they’ll fill up whatever container you put them into (think about a kid blowing up a balloon).
Plasma is electrically charged gas. Lightning is a great example.
And those aren’t the only states of matter. You may have heard of quantum states of matter, theoretical states of matter, or Bose-Einstein condensates (okay, maybe you haven’t heard of that one). We won’t deal with any of these at our story hour, but they’re fun to think about.
There is still a lot of discussion in science about how many states of matter there are, whether plasma should be its own category, and how some things don’t seem to fit neatly into any category.
One physicist persuasively argued that cats are solid sometimes and liquid at other times, because of how we cats can change shape to fill up whatever cardboard box or container we climb into whether it’s big or small, and how willing we are to go with the flow. (I’m paraphrasing. Google it, it’s pretty funny!)
This free story hour is geared towards kids ages 3 -10 and their caregivers, and all ages are welcome. We hope to see you there, whatever shape you’re in!
