Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to ...

In normal everyday life we come across matter in three states, solid, liquid and gas. ... but because the bonds between separate molecules are usually less tight, liquids expand more than solids.

The molecules that make up a gas are about 100 to 1000 times further apart than the molecules of a solid or liquid. Imagine what a tablespoon of water looks like. If that same number of molecules was ...

Water’s just plain old water, right? Not when you trap it inside a tiny channel, it seems, because then it behaves like no other solid, liquid or gas.

From these measurements, they characterized the phase of the molecules and were able to reproduce the transitions between gas, liquid, and solid, that was expected.