when did plasma become a state of matter
Plasma (physics) Plasma (from Ancient Greek πλάσμα​, meaning 'moldable substance'[1]) is one of the four fundamental states of matter, and was first described by chemist Irving Langmuir[2] in the 1920s.[3] Unlike the other three states, solid, liquid, and gas, plasma does not exist freely on the Earth's surface under normal conditions. Plasma can only be artificially generated by heating or subjecting a neutral gas to a strong electromagnetic field to the point an ionised gaseous substance becomes increasingly electrically conductive, and long-range electromagnetic fields dominate the behavior of the matter.[4]