I read Vonneguts Cat’s Cradle recently and one thing that bugs me is the nature of ICE-9.
I understand it raises the freezing point of water to 114 degrees Farenheit upon contact. What bothers me it’s mentioned several times that Ice-9 can apparently be easily melted and such water used with no ill effects.
Several examples:
The good doctor was melting it in his cookware just before he deid, leaving a pan full of Ice-9.
When ‘Papa’ dies, they plan to burn the body on a pyle.
Animals frozen by the ice-9 can be melted and eaten.
My problem is that it would seem that any water frozen by Ice-9 would be forever contaminated and thus even if you melted it, it would immediatly freeze again once the tempreture dropped back to room temperature. Thus, any Ice-9 water that got loose would cause the inevitable chain reaction that destories the world.
Or say, you melted a frozen ice-9 pig, ate it, it woudl seem it would freeze again as soon as it got cool enough, and god help anyone whose taken a bite of said pig.
Or am I overthinking this because Vonnegut didn’t really care?
Ice 9 isn’t a special chemical, it’s just a phase of ice. It’s plain ol’ H[sub]2[/sub]O, but its molecules are arranged in the solid state in a certain way. What made it different from other phases of water was the process you go through to get it into that phase. (I don’t remember if the book every explained what that was, but it probably involved following a certain pressure-temperature curve.)
Once you cause a phase transition by raising ice IX’s temperature above 114 degrees, it stops being ice 9 and becomes another phase (liquid). It doesn’t have any memory of what it used to be . . . now it’s just H[sub]2[/sub]O in a liquid phase instead of the peculiar solid phase.
Yep. Water has no memory of the patterns it’s been in. I could take a bunch of thread and sew it into a Nazi flag, but if someone ravelled the flag until it was just a bunch of threads again, those threads would not be contaminated by the pernicious symbol they’d once formed.
Ice-9 is just water in a particular pattern. Destroy the pattern, and you’ve got water molecules.
The answer’s are all correct, but if most of the water on earth that’s not already ice has become ice-9, what you propose is the least of your problems.
I wish I understood crystallization better, but I’ll give it a shot. Some substances have more than one possible form for their crystals. Carbon, for example, can be coal, diamond, or Buckminsterfullerene. If you could break down the crystals in Buckminsterfullerine, and allowed it to recrystallize, you might get coal. I hope that wasn’t really, really dumb.
Ice-9, of course is fictional. If there is a variety of water crystals in real life, I don’t know about it.
I’ve kind of wondered about the end of Cat’s Cradle much like the OP. It is not true that 120 degree liquid water would be contaminated (and it is quite possible to eat food at 120 degrees; the human body senses pain between 50 degrees and 60 degrees C, or 122 to 140 degrees), but I think that it may be true that anything dropping below 114 fahrenheit would get rapidly converted back to ice-9 due to microscopic ice-9 crystals.
The water in the soil, the water in the atmosphere is rapidly crystallized out in the end of the book; that would mean that there are tons of tiny crystals blowing around and in the soil. You would need to be very careful to not breathe in one of these crystals – say heat all air that you breathe to 120 degrees before inhaling, etc. It would seem like just inhaling a few microscopic crystals may be enough to precipitate out your whole body. Same thing goes with contact of your sweat or skin moisture to the ground or whatever.
It is still one of my favorite books, though. Hanging over my desk for nearly my entire 5.5 year PhD (and taunting me through failed experiments and flawed hypotheses galore) was the Bokonon quote:
I’ll leave it to you to surmise what kind of ignorant I am…
Note that there are 12 known (real-life) allotropes of water-ice, including an Ice-IX! Take a sample of any one of them, melt them, then refreeze in the right temperature and pressure conditions, and you have any of the other types. Water doesn’t have memory.
Note that KVj’s brother Bernard Vonnegut was the guy who discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding. This was a significant inspiration for the story.