The Fourth State of Matter

This term refers to the galaxy that houses Earth and its solar system. The name itself describes the appearance of the galaxy from Earth’s perspective, which humans see as a hazy, milky strip of light. Early in the essay, Beard sees the Milky Way in the night as she lets her collie out to pee and describes it as “a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard” (Paragraph 3). The Milky Way and the implicit Jupiter give way to Beard’s introduction of her work colleagues, “space physicists who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky” (Paragraph 3). The chalkboard simile more clearly heralds Beard’s workplace into the essay—the chalkboard being a place where she and her colleague Christopher Goetz discourse and develop a friendship, but also where she draws her collie’s impending death, which darkly foreshadows the deaths of her colleagues.

This term refers to Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, an early physiologist and neurologist from Russia. He is famed for his discovery of “classical conditioning,” which describes the ability to associate a physiological stimulus, such as eating a piece of meat, with an unrelated stimulus, such as a ringing bell, so that the same response is eventually elicited by the unrelated stimulus (“Ivan Pavlov Biographical.” The Nobel Prize). For example, Pavlov noted how dogs eating red meat salivated, and through classical conditioning, associated the ringing of a bell with the consumption of that meat. Eventually, the sound of the ringing bell caused the dogs to salivate. Beard, in describing her shifting relationship with her deteriorating collie who now struggles with mobility and continuously has accidents in the house, references Pavlov: “She is Pavlov and I am her dog” (Paragraph 7). In describing the inversion in their relationship, her collie, Pavlov, has trained Beard to do laundry at the sound of her thumping tail, which Beard immediately associates with the dog urinating in the house.

This term means a colorless fluid that can describe corporeal liquids like milk, lymph, and blood, but can also describe ionized gas relevant to stars—both definitions are relevant to how this essay uses the term. “The Fourth State of Matter,” this essay’s title, is another way to define plasma. Plasma is Beard’s colleague Christopher Goertz’s current obsession. Beard is quick to translate this into layman’s terms, saying, “Plasma is blood” (Paragraph 32). The duality of plasma in the essay establishes a comparison between celestial matter relevant to the research of her colleagues at the University of Iowa’s space-physics department and blood. The latter definition serves as a foreshadowing vehicle for the violence in the form of graduate student Gang Lu’s mass shooting.