States of Matter: A glaring misconception

I was just discussing matter and fundamental particles with a friend when I realised that something has begun to go wrong and the ignorance among people shows it. They know that what I speak of is true, they've always known it. Yet their minds have decided that matter actually exists in three different 'species', believe it or not.

Classification is the basic and fundamental property of abstraction. It makes life easier, and is invaluable. But, some people begin to believe that the artificial *wall-of-division* between each group is quite concrete. In a similar fashion, many people, especially children have lost touch with the fact that Solids, Liquids and Gases are nothing but atoms with different ranges of force of attraction. There is a very elegant graph, a potential energy vs. distance one, which explains the region of solids, liquids and gases very well, which I shall not go into here.

The point is, everything is made up of a fundamental entity. As of today, we are made to understand that atom is the abstraction that is the fundamental entity. It comprises of sub-atomic particles, but essentially, the atom as a whole is what is a repeating unit. Logically quite strange, since atoms vary in sizes, which immediately discards that repeating-unit property. Hence the logical reasoning is that there exists an entity which is elementary. I am not in a position to give you the Truth. In the Age of Reason (circa Aristotle), we were made to believe that whatever cannot be divided any more, say by crushing repeatedly, is the fundamental Truth. In the Age of Science (circa Dalton), we were explained atoms scientifically. And it goes on till today. Now, the terms Solids, Liquids and Gases were created for the sake of abstraction of physical & chemical behaviour since mostly all gases showed nearly similar properties, with just a few variations in quantification of properties. But the essence, that everything is just atoms is true. Hence people who say that Solids 'convert' to liquids and so on, blindly thinking it to be one independent species converting to another are not justified in thinking so.