Ice-nine
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Ice-nine is a fictional material conceived by writer Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Cat's Cradle. It is supposed to be a more stable polymorph of water than common ice (Ice Ih) which instead of melting at 0° Celsius (32° Fahrenheit), melts at 45.8°C (114.4°F). When ice-nine comes into contact with liquid water below 45.8°C (which is thus effectively supercooled), it acts as a seed crystal, and causes the solidification of the entire body of water which quickly crystallizes as ice-nine. A global catastrophe involving freezing the Earth's oceans by simple contact with ice-nine is used as a plot device in Vonnegut's novel.
Vonnegut came across the idea while working at General Electric:
- The author Vonnegut credits the invention of ice-nine to Irving Langmuir, who pioneered the study of thin films and interfaces. While working in the public relations office at General Electric Vonnegut came across a story of how Langmuir, who won the 1932 Nobel Prize for his work at General Electric, was charged with the responsibility of entertaining the author H.G. Wells, who was visiting the company in the early 1930s. Langmuir is said to have come up with an idea about a form of solid water that was stable at room temperature in the hopes that Wells might be inspired to write a story about it. Apparently, Wells was not inspired and neither he nor Langmuir ever published anything about it. After Langmuir and Wells had died, Vonnegut decided to use the idea in his book Cat's Cradle.[1]
The fictional ice-nine should not be confused with the real-world ice polymorph Ice IX, which does not have these properties.
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[edit] Nonfiction
While multiple polymorphs of ice do exist (they can be created under pressure), none have the properties described in this book, and none are stable at standard temperature and pressure above the ordinary melting point of ice. The real Ice IX has none of the properties of Vonnegut's creation, and can exist only at extremely low temperatures and high pressures.
The ice-nine phenomenon has, in fact, occurred with a few other kinds of crystals, called "disappearing polymorphs". In these cases, a new variant of a crystal has been introduced into an environment, replacing many of the older form crystals with its own form. One example is the anti-AIDS medicine ritonavir, where the newer version destroyed the effectiveness of the drug[2] until improved manufacturing and distribution was developed.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ "Using Science Fiction To Teach Thermodynamics: Vonnegut, Ice-nine, and Global Warming". Journal of Chemical Education 81: 509. 2004.
- ^ Morissette, Soukasene, Levinson, Cima, and Almarsson. "Elucidation of crystal form diversity of the HIV protease inhibitor ritonavir by high-throughput crystallization", pgs. 2180–2184. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, March 2003.
