**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[chemist]

I never studied phsyics or chemistry in any detail at school, which is a huge shame because it interests me so much. So my understanding of physics is pretty much thanks to intuition and internet, which means it's heavily flawed and limited. But I'd still bet it's a better grasp than most uneducated folk. I would love to study phsyics properly.

You didn't miss anything at school.
Nelkon & Parker was the standard A-Level textbook.
https://archive.org/details/AdvancedLevelPhysics
Read it and yawn. The joys of calculating angular momentums without any practical reason.

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I feel like states of matter are relatively arbitrary. I was taught in high school chemistry that glass is technically a liquid that flows unbelievably slowly, and that this could be observed in old houses, where the panes of glass are somewhat thicker at the bottom than at the top, due to creep.

That feels iffy... I'm soft on chemistry.

Actually it is pure physics. Viscosity at room temperature.
In the American Journal of Physics, materials engineer Edgar D. Zanotto predicted the relaxation time for Germanium Dioxide at room temperature would be 10 to the power of 32 years, (that's a few billion and a few more zeros), which is quite a bit longer than our universe has been around.
Silicon Dioxide Glass is an even thicker liquid so would flow even slower at standard Ts and Ps. The old house would have to be in another much older universe to observe any creep.

What's the difference between an amorphous solid and a non-Newtonian fluid?
Is this why ketchup doesn't come out of the bottle?
If you bang it too hard would the bottle flow as well?
Could the ketchup and bottle form a colloidal suspension?
Is Renton correct that states of matter can appear relatively arbitrary?

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The Coulomb force ... is stylistically no different from Newton's Law of Gravitation.

We like the electrical permittivity of free space.