3144: Phase Changes

Phase Changes

|< < Prev #3144 (September 19, 2025) Next > >|

Title text: People looking for the gaps in our understanding where the meaning of consciousness or free will might hide often turn to quantum uncertainty or infinite cosmologies, as if we don't have breathtakingly complex emergent phenomena right there in our freezers.

|< < Prev Random Explanation Next > >|

Explanation

This comic illustrates the difference between the simplified idealised version of science that is often taught in the classroom, and the much weirder, more unexpected and complicated phenomena that can happen in reality.

In the first panel, Blondie is teaching the textbook version of the freezing of water, which is that it changes from a liquid to a solid at exactly 0°C. The expectation might be that the next panel will explain that it's rather more complicated than that, due to factors such as impurities and mixing of ice and liquid water, which mean that both solid and liquid water, or a mix of the two, can exist at temperatures above and below 0°C.

Instead, it illustrates a much more surprising effect — that of ice spikes. Normally, water freezes uniformly when still, and creates a relatively smooth, flat surface. However, very occasionally, all but a small portion of the surface freezes. Because water expands by ~9% as it freezes, and the water below the surface has only this hole to expand through, the liquid water seeps out through the hole as it expands, freezes at the edges, the remaining water seeps out of this extension to the hole, and so on until there is no more water capable of seeping past the freezing. This creates shapes such as spikes, where the rate of seepage is marginally less than the ability to disperse over the advancing ice-'tunnel', or inverted pyramids, where the rate slightly exceeds the ability to be retained. Cross-sectionally, they tend to have six-fold symmetry, for the same reasons as snowflake nucleation does. (That both structures are observed emerging from the single freezing body of water would make the comic's example somewhat counterintuitive, but we are already dealing with an example where two separate seepage holes must have developed without either losing their ability to extend due to the other's possibly preferential release of water.)

When remarking about the ice spike in the right panel, Blondie says that the water is "trying to give us a present." This may come from the fact that ice spikes are generally diagonally extended, as dictated by the initial dominant plane of ice-crystallization, making them look as if they are reaching out towards someone or something. It may also reference the fact that many people would experience surprised delight at finding such an odd formation.

The title text mocks people who look at things that remain gaps in scientific knowledge, like free will and consciousness, and try to assign deeper meaning to them them through fuzzy ideas like quantum uncertainty (e.g. Roger Penrose's theory of orchestrated objective reduction) or infinite cosmologies (e.g. multiverse hypotheses with the anthropic principle), when phenomena like ice spikes show that even in simple systems, emergent properties can cause unexpected results. This suggests that consciousness is also an emergent property of a simpler system, and not something that relies on some "magical" secret sauce like quantum uncertainty or infinite cosmologies.

Ice spikes were also referenced in the title text of 3025: Phase Change.

Transcript

[Blondie is standing to the right of a table, with her right hand gesturing toward a bowl of ice sitting on a table. There is a header above the comic. There is a line underneath the header.]

Header: Phase change in theory

Blondie: As you can see, when water is cooled to below 0°C, it changes from a liquid to a solid.

[Blondie is standing in the same position, but the bowl now contains ice which has uneven structures growing out of it. To the left of the bowl, the ice is growing a trapezoid longer at the top than the bottom, and on the right side, the bowl is growing a large diagonal spike, which has a wider lower half then the upper half, the tip of which hangs over the edge of the bowl. There is a line underneath the header.]

Header: Phase change in practice

Blondie: When water freezes, it sometimes sends out long weird spikes.

Blondie: Physics tells us the water is "trying to give us a present."

  Add comment        Create topic (use sparingly)       Refresh 

Discussion

Heyyyyyyy, new comic! --DollarStoreBa'al^converse 12:47, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

finally, a comic about crystallography 2607:FB91:1498:5878:AD2:E57:4DFB:1B7F 12:52, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Water: Who wants a hugggg??? 173.95.168.108 (talk) 02:13, 20 September 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Man, now every single time I hear anything about "ice spikes" my mind immediately goes to Minecraft. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Willintendo (talk) 04:01, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

Does anyone know if it is possible to deliberately create one? Divad27182 (talk) 05:09, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

For sure - you just need a spike-shaped mould and a freezer... 82.13.184.33 10:10, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Without having personally investigated it, but knowing the general conditions being suggested, first a container that's shallow, wide and steep-sided at the depth of the water. (Would an upturned frisbee do? ...but a fairly solid one, not the overly floppy/rubbery type.)

Then, not sure about the freezing criteria, but I'm guessing a fairly slow and steady drop in temperature down to and past freezing. A single particularly rough patch at water-level, or other contamination, might help start the freezing there, rather in the centre and freezing to the edge, sufficient to start an ice-'skin' (plastic frisbee might help to keep the denser, warmer water below the surface warmer and denser longer than with a metalic dish of the same profile) which you want to spread across and around the surface. The last bit to freeze should ideally be in the middle (as in, not at the actual far edge), so I don't know if there's anything you can do (a lesser, but still, rough surface within the container?) to encourage ice-growth around the perimeter (pi.r distance) quicker than straight across the surface (2.r). Ideally, it'll be a single conformist ice-crystal (like they attempt to cast jet-engine blades, but for different reasons and in a different shape), although possibly starting icing off at more than three semi-regularly spaces on the rim would meet up at all the edges correctly before any of the 'ice fronts' hit the actual centre.

Perhaps hold the ambient air tempreature just slightly below freezing, if you can't just keep going slow. You don't want to cool the subsurface too much yet, if you can help it.

Once there's a (mostly) established ice-skin (probably pressing directly up against the edge due to the expansion of the ice, and thick enough to not fracture itself from those lateral forces) except for the last spot of no-ice (or thinnest-ice that will easily 'erupt' a fracture-hole) then continued cooling will reach the non-surface water and raise its ideal volume, it'll come up through the hole/weak-point and overflow, in the open air, and the flow-rate and scale of the emerging water-through-hole will dictate where the cool air finally freezes the outflow. And the orientation(s) of the existing crystaline ice will dictate what skew it might have (I can't think of a way to force that in any particular direction without manually adding seed-crystals of ice at just the right moment in just the right way).:

If there's just the right temperature profile (over time), the pressure profile (therefore the outflow profile, therefore the hole-/extrusion-edge freezing profile) will lead to the spiky or inverted-pyramidal ice formation for as long as there remains enough under-ice water with enough latent expansion to feed the process.

The lab experiments may have been using distilled/hyperpurified water to limit and control the spontaneous ice-formation, but clearly 'in the wild' examples have managed with liquid that's not particularly free of common solutes (solid and gaseous). And the temperature of the overnight frost isn't exactly fine-tuned. It's probably more that some containers can do this sort of thing andcsoke can't. A saucer of water is more likely to wedge its expanding ice outwards, raise its whole ice-top up to relieve the freezing-induced pressure and only seep out at all edges.

But any more likely container (something like a discarded coffee-jar lid, comes to mind, if the frisbee isn't right at the edges, and has some other useful features that might aid icing up 'properly') that's one of many such containers, that happen to be outside on an eventually freezing night, has a non-zero chance of doing everything required, even/especially with bits of autumnal leaf or storm-blown twig 'contaminating' the pooled rainwater. And enough small chances lead it near certainty that it will happen to at least one of them as the conditions were just right.

Invoking it in a household freezer could also be possible (with the correct setup and freezer (re-)settings), and maybe even tap water can do the job of 'pure' water. But far fewer trials can be carried out (per attempt) than nature conducts entirely without human intent/fine-tuning.

Lab-based experiments can at least apply even more control (and an intelligent amount of tuning) to the attempts to replicate nature. Though still seems far from certain, from the brief reading I've done on this, that they can invoke the effect any time they feel like it. If anybody here manages to reproducibly pull together the necessary physical alchemy (especially with a household freezer), I'm sure everyone else studying this would be very interested to discover your particular 'recipe' and play with it themselves. ;) 82.132.238.57 16:42, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

tl;dr: To make ice spikes, freeze distilled water in a regular ice cube tray. --Mwarren (talk) 02:40, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
        Add comment