There are two rules I follow: If I correct the mistake before anyone else, It Never Happened. Second, always make hay from a mistake when correcting it.
So what I meant to say was "diffuse."
- dif·fuse
VERB
spread or cause to spread over a wide area or among a large number of people:
"technologies diffuse rapidly" ·
synonyms:
spread · spread out · spread around · send out · scatter · disperse ·
- ADJECTIVE
spread out over a large area; not concentrated:
"the diffuse community centered on the church" ·
synonyms:
spread out · diffused · scattered · dispersed · not concentrated
What I intended, obviously, was to contrast two states of matter: gas and plasma. This is helpful because we all understand the way a gas spreads into a room. It diffuses with an i and two fs. It may be colorless and odorless, or it may carry other agents, like a scent, which is made up of benzenes, which are not pollutants, in my opinion. Gas, we are taught, has no definite shape and no definite volume. Plasma, which we do experience sometimes on the planet earth, takes forms of its own. And these forms are recognizable to us: we see sheets, or cells, or sometimes braids and filaments. The plasma forms also glow in a lot of different wavelengths.
And that is partly why we might say, "Look at that aurora borealis. I think it might be really exciting because it looks like it is self-organizing."
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