Length1h 46m
About this audiobook
Plasma is the state of matter that almost everything is made of. The stars, the space between them, the Sun's wind brushing past Earth, the glow in a neon sign, the arc of a welding torch, the filament of a lightning bolt: all plasma, more than ninety-nine percent of the ordinary matter in the visible universe. This book is a plain-language tour of the fourth state, written without a single equation. It begins with the state itself, how a gas becomes a plasma, and the two collective laws that set it apart from any neutral gas. It follows the people who recognized the state, from Geissler's glowing tubes through Crookes's radiant matter, Thomson's electron, Langmuir's naming, and Alfvén's waves. It builds the grammar of a charged population in words, shows how laboratory discharges make plasma deliberately, and how diagnostics read a state that cannot be weighed, thermometered, or watched at the particle level.
Audiobook details
GenreEducation and Learning
Length1 hr 46 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateOct 22, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction
2Chapter 1: The Fourth State
3Chapter 2: How a Gas Becomes a Plasma
4Chapter 3: The People and the Discovery
5Chapter 4: The Grammar of a Charged Gas
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6Chapter 5: The Fluid of the Cosmos
7Chapter 6: Making Plasma in the Laboratory
8Chapter 7: Reading the Invisible: The Art of Diagnostics
9Chapter 8: The Magnetic Bottle
10Chapter 9: Fusion's Honest Ledger
11Chapter 10: Plasmas of the Solar System
12Chapter 11: The Sun's Weather and the Planet's Power Grid
13Chapter 12: Plasmas Between and Beyond the Stars
14Chapter 13: Plasma at Work: The Industrial State
15Chapter 14: Frontiers of the Cold State
16Chapter 15: The Open Questions: Turbulence, Reconnection, and the Rest
17Chapter 16: Fun Facts and Trivia, Graded
18Conclusion
19References: Plasma Physics
20Glossary
21About the Author
22Series Info
23Copyright
