Engineering Question #
, a year old from asks on January 1, 1970,
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The answer
Barry Shell
answered on March 31, 2002
If you want to go to the cosmic scale the maximum is astronomically huge, such as the pressures experienced inside a neutron star or a black hole. At those pressures, liquid, gas and solid don't count anymore because all the electrons have been stripped away and you just have packed nuclei. Here on earth, you can get huge compression factors with some bombs, and in particular with nuclear bombs.
Air and all gasses can be compressed so much they become liquid. This is common practice to make tanks of liquid air and other gases for hospitals and many industrial processes.
You can visit the US NIST Chemistry Web Book and get all sorts of information about the chemistry of things including what pressures you need to compress gasses into liquids. Look for Critical Pressure values (a big P with a little C beside it). This is the pressure at which a gas turns to a liquid. Your number of 51 is for oxygen. Nitrogen is somewhere around 34 bar.
Once a substance is a liquid or a solid it doesn't compress much more, but it DOES compress a bit. The change is measured in parts per million however, so it's practically not noticeable.
To make a nuclear bomb go off, you have to compress the plutonium so that the nuclei form a critical mass for a chain reaction. This is done by setting off conventional explosives around the plutonium in such a way that a huge compression is applied to the plutonium in the centre. So in this sense, even a solid can be compressed.
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