So if plasma is just superheated gas...

Discussion in 'The Spam Zone' started by jackdaniel0, Sep 17, 2015.

  1. jackdaniel0 Twilight Town Denizen

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    ...and gas gets hot when you compress it...
    What if you could supercompress gas between your palms? Could you create plasma and/or lightning?

    Could you create lightning by making water droplets bounce against each other?
     
  2. Amaury Chaser

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  3. Boy Wonder Dark Phoenix in Training

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    You are one experiment away from becoming a supervillain.
     
  4. Mixt The dude that does the thing

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    As you can see in the simplified chart below, plasma is unique. For many reasons, but important to this discussion is that the temperature required doesn't rely on pressure like it does for the other states. So at a constant high temperature you can only turn a gas into a liquid by increasing the temperature.

    [​IMG]

    But as you noted there are the gas laws, specifically Gay-Lussac's Law, stating that Pressure and Temperature are directly related. But this is assuming other factors like volume and moles are the same. It is easy to adjust the temperature without affecting those other factors significantly, but I know of no way to adjust the pressure directly. Because of this the gains in temperature you can expect to see from compressing a sample is insignificant. But technically still there. So if you had a sample of gas that was borderline plasma, in some unrealistically durable balloon, and compressed it you could successfully kill yourself. And I guess create plasma with your bare hands as well.