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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Factual: History

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

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Melvyn Bragg

Justin Wark

Kate Lancaster

Bill Graham

Simon Tillotson

In Our Time: Plasma

Plasma

13/10/2016

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Plasma

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss plasma, one of the fundamental states of matter.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss plasma. First observed in 1879, plasma is the most abundant matter in the universe, far more than solid, liquid or gas.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss plasma, the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid and gas. As over ninety-nine percent of all observable matter in the Universe is plasma, planets like ours, with so little plasma and so much solid, liquid and gas, appear all the more remarkable. On the grand scale, plasma is what the Sun is made from and, when we look into the night sky, almost everything we can see with the naked eye is made of plasma. On the smallest scale, here on Earth, scientists make plasma to etch the microchips on which we rely for so much. Plasma is in the fluorescent light bulbs above our heads and, in laboratories around the world, it is the subject of tests to create, one day, an inexhaustible and clean source of energy from nuclear fusion.

With 

Justin Wark
Professor of Physics and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Oxford

Kate Lancaster
Research Fellow for Innovation and Impact at the York Plasma Institute at the University of York

and 

Bill Graham
Professor of Physics at Queens University, Belfast


Producer: Simon Tillotson.

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