If you’re drinking water, it feels like a liquid. Alternately, if you managed to escape through an emergency exit the cabin of a doomed ocean-crossing airplane but forgot to locate an unsupplied parachute, the calm waves feel more like cement when you land.

Let’s take it to eleven: a sea otter floating on his back still feels as though he’s partially submerged in a liquid, even as he watches your body splatter flat on the surface as if you had jumped out of a skyscraper and landed on Broadway Avenue. This example illustrates the concept of regions of experience, which I like to think of as a far-reaching phenomena that is at play in a great many areas. For example, I would consider the portion of special relativity dealing with the frames of reference of objects in motion to intersect the regions of experience phenomena. And, more than an intersection, the sea otter thought experiment belongs to a subset of the phenomena dealing with the perspective-dependence of water’s state of matter. I don’t know whether it’s significant that the intersection and subset share speed as a fundamental component, but it’s probably worth noting.

Establishing the fact that a person’s perception of water as a liquid or solid depends on their speed prompts two questions:

1. If a person’s body could withstand the hardships of flying hundreds of miles per hour through a large cloud, would the person feel as though they were underwater?

2. Does a high velocity object create an as yet undiscovered state of matter when it collides with a solid?

These questions assume that increasing velocity corresponds to the perception of matter moving in the gas–>liquid–>solid direction, as is suggested by what we know to be true in the falling airplane passenger case.

A note of clarification on question 2: given that the sea otter in the airplane example never perceives the water as a solid, any new state of matter beyond solid resulting from an object’s collision with a solid would only be perceptible to the object itself.

If the answer to question 1 is true, one may wonder by extension whether flying through the cloud many times faster would result in traversing all the way to the other side of the states of matter spectrum, so that the perception was of colliding with a solid. If this is also true, and it likely is, then one can definitively say that a person can perceive a gas as any of the principle states of matter naturally occurring on earth and that their perception is a function of their speed relative to it. I add the ‘principle states of matter’ and ‘naturally occurring on earth’ qualifiers because plasma is the most common state of matter in the universe but accommodating it in this post would require excessive writing for only a small return on investment.

A final comment. We know that decreasing velocity doesn’t correspond to the perception of matter in the solid–>liquid–>gas direction. Usually, you can obtain a physical behavior’s opposite by reversing the math governing the behavior, but even adding a minus sign and making the velocity negative doesn’t help in this case because we know that the speed-dependent gas–>liquid–>solid state of matter flow is independent of the direction of the person moving through the matter. Maybe Stephen Hawking can solve this asymmetry.