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Just to be clear -- this story is fictional, it did not happen in real life. It has become a bit of an urban legend because of a video game but does not have a
by tcskeptic 5mo ago
Just to be clear -- this story is fictional, it did not happen in real life. It has become a bit of an urban legend because of a video game but does not have a basis in fact.
- harperlee 5mo agoInteresting! Could you expand?
- wduquette 5mo agoObligatory reference to Ice-9 in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle: a form of water ice that freezes at a high temperature.
- gwern 5mo agoSource for it being fictional? The original 1960 source describes it as extremely nonfictional: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1960-analog-october.pdf#page=44 https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1960-analog-oc...
- gjm11 5mo agoIt also, unsurprisingly, tells a slightly different and less startling story: it's not that glycerine crystallized in one lab and suddenly others around the world had the same problem, it's that glycerine hadn't been crystallizing in one lab but once the lab was sent a sample of crystallized glycerine the stuff always did crystallize there, presumably (assuming the story's true) because of some sort of tiny particles (whether of glycerine or of something else) that float about in the air or adhere to glassware and encourage glycerine to crystallize.