7 ms·
So we may still find some day ice-nine like the one found in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Or do we know that it's impossible?
by Hokusai 5y ago
So we may still find some day ice-nine like the one found in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Or do we know that it's impossible?
- dr_dshiv 5y agoThe pressures required for those ices make them unstable and, thankfully, unable to freeze the ocean.
- mietek 5y agoTangential, but — have you heard about vacuum decay? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijFm6DxNVyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijFm6DxNVyI
- nawgz 5y agoIt would seem to me some laws of thermodynamics would prevent any such "infection"-style reaction, but I am not a physicist nor chemist.
- tomrod 5y agoThere is some debate in a certain context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo Entertaining too!
- sp332 5y agoSupercooled water shows this kind of reaction with normal ice.
- nawgz 5y agoRight, but that "supercooled water" can only make such a reaction because, thermodynamically speaking, someone intentionally injected energy into it without changing its state, thus enabling the reaction to occur within the bounds of the energy delta created, and ending when that ends. I do not see how a molecule could be stable in some condition, and then when making contact with something else, result in nothing other than a cascading state-change of that other. It doesn't make sense.
- rocqua 5y agoThe issue occurs if the new state is inherently lower energy. This is already the case with prions.
- nawgz 5y agoI am not under the impression folding proteins is a state-change, and it's also unclear to me if it is a chemical reaction, so I do not think I understand the relevance of this point. I specifically stated the parameters.
- sp332 5y agoIt's not a chemical change. Neither is ice forming from water.
- nawgz 5y agoYes, clearly ice <-> water is a state change and not chemical, but my point is mostly that prions / protein folding is neither a state-change nor a chemical change, so I don't see how it's relevant to the posited scenario.
- beecafe 5y agoA prion causing other proteins to misfold can only occur if the misfolded state has lower energy than the correctly folded one. It does this by acting as a catalyst, lowering the potential energy barrier that was allowing the protein to persist in the correctly folded state, to the point where e.g thermal fluctuations allow it to cross that barrier. The equivalent could occur if there was a lower energy state for water (and an ice-9 like scenario could then occur if this lower energy state catalyzed further transitions to this lower energy state). We don't expect this to be possible though, as we can't make water decay by other ways of making it cross that hypothetical potential energy barrier by dumping energy into it (whereas for a protein you can e.g burn it, denature it, etc), and aren't aware of catalytic activity by any forms of water.
- erehweb 5y agoThere's an anecdote that Vonnegut was talking to a scientist at a party and explained the idea for Ice-9. The scientist went pale and sat in a corner for a couple of hours staring into space in deep thought, after which he stood up with a smile and said "No, it's impossible".
- dumbfoundded 5y agoMaybe it's time for a strange matter hypothesis sequel
- tomrod 5y agoYou may find this Kurzgesagt entertaining. Not explicitly ice-nine, but related. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo