Before the 20th centuaary, the

term matter included ordinary matter composed of atoms and excluded other energy
phenomena such as light or sound. This concept of matter may be generalized from atoms to
include any objects having mass even when at rest, but this is ill-defined because an
object's mass can arise from its (possibly massless) constituents' motion and interaction
energies. Thus, matter does not have a universal definition, nor is it a fundamental concept
in physics today. Matter is also used loosely as a general term for the substance that makes up
all observablephysical objects.[1][2]
All the objects from everyday life that we can bump into, touch or squeeze are composed
of atoms. This atomic matter is in turn made up of interacting subatomic particlesusually
a nucleus of protons and neutrons, and a cloud of orbitingelectrons.[3][4] Typically, science
considers these composite particles matter because they have both rest mass and volume. By
contrast, massless particles, such as photons, are not considered matter, because they have
neither rest mass nor volume. However, not all particles with rest mass have a classical volume,
since fundamental particles such as quarks and leptons (sometimes equated with matter) are
considered "point particles" with no effective size or volume. Nevertheless, quarks and leptons
together make up "ordinary matter", and their interactions contribute to the effective volume of
the composite particles that make up ordinary matter.

Matter commonly exists in four states (or phases): solid, liquid and gas, and plasma. However,
advances in experimental techniques have revealed other previously theoretical phases, such
as BoseEinstein condensates andfermionic condensates. A focus on an elementary-particle
view of matter also leads to new phases of matter, such as the quarkgluon plasma.[5] For much
of the history of the natural sciences people have contemplated the exact nature of matter. The
idea that matter was built of discrete building blocks, the so-called particulate theory of matter,
was first put forward by the Greek philosophers Leucippus (~490 BC) and Democritus (~470
380 BC).[6]
Matter should not be confused with mass, as the two are not quite the same in modern physics.
[7]

For example, mass is a conserved quantity, which means that its value is unchanging through

time, within closed systems. However, matter is not conserved in such systems, although this is
not obvious in ordinary conditions on Earth, where matter is approximately conserved.
Still, special relativity shows that matter may disappear by conversion into energy, even inside
closed systems, and it can also be created from energy, within such systems. However,
because mass (like energy) can neither be created nor destroyed, the quantity of mass and the
quantity of energy remain the same during a transformation of matter (which represents a
certain amount of energy) into non-material (i.e., non-matter) energy. This is also true in the
reverse transformation of energy into matter.
Different fields of science use the term matter in different, and sometimes incompatible, ways.
Some of these ways are based on loose historical meanings, from a time when there was no
reason to distinguish mass and matter. As such, there is no single universally agreed scientific
meaning of the word "matter". Scientifically, the term "mass" is well-defined, but "matter" is not.
Sometimes in the field of physics "matter" is simply equated with particles that exhibit rest mass
(i.e., that cannot travel at the speed of light), such as quarks and leptons. However, in
both physics andchemistry, matter exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties, the socalled waveparticle duality