Have you even wondered if ranch dressing is a liquid or a solid. Yeah… Me neither! But that doesn't stop the scientists from asking the question.

And the answer they got was it's actually both! And neither! What… What?!?

You probably learned in school that there are three states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. Think ice cube, a puddle of water and fog. Maybe you also learned about a fourth state, known as plasma. Turns out that ranch dressing is none of these! 

Imagine you're eating dinner. You try to pour some ranch dressing onto your plate to dip your veggies into. You tip the container upside down, but nothing comes out. Seems like a solid.

So you shake the bottle up and down, and a big blob of dressing plops out and hits your plate. Seems like a liquid.

But the dressing doesn't spread all over the plate, like milk or any other liquid would if you spilled it. Rather, it maintains some shape, kind of like the veggies on your plate. Seems like a solid.

But every time you plunge your solid carrot or celery into the blob of dressing, it distorts the shape of the blob a bit. You can even smear and spread the blob around, but the shape and stiffness of the celery isn't affected by this game. Seems like a liquid.

As it turns out, ranch dressing is actually a fifth state of matter known as soft matter. Soft matter can have properties of both liquids and solids, so materials scientists say it is viscoelastic — a combination of viscous and elastic. Other common examples of soft matter include yogurt, cookie dough, shampoo, toothpaste, silly putty, snot, slime and frosting.

These substances aren't quite solid and aren't quite liquid — they're a little of both. You can pour shampoo out of a bottle, but if you put a bit between your fingers and pull them apart, it will stretch between your fingers. Cookie dough can hold its own shape, but if you push on it, it deforms and doesn't bounce back.

The reason these squishy materials have both liquid and solid properties is that they're made of polymers: long, chainlike molecules. These long chains get all tangled up, like a bowl of spaghetti, so they are sort of connected, like the molecules in a solid, but also sort of free to move past one other, like molecules in a liquid.

Most store-bought ranch dressing contains xantham gum, which is a natural polymer used to thicken and stabilize many foods.

So the next time you try to pour your ranch dressing out of the bottle, you can imagine the xantham gum polymers all tangled up with one another, making the dressing act like a solid. When you shake the bottle, you're disentangling the polymers so they slide and flow past each other, allowing the dressing to flow easily out of the bottle and onto your plate.

Isn't science fun!