3144: Phase Changes
| Phase Changes |
 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. |
Explanation
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This is one of 53 incomplete explanations: This page was created in a Minecraft Ice Spikes Biome. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
This comic's humor comes from the rare, unexpected results of common activities.
Blondie, demonstrating the odd property of Ice spikes, compares the expected and unexpected consequences of freezing water and the difference between what is expected and what is given. When remarking about the Ice spike in the right panel, she says that the water is "trying to give us a present." This may come from the fact that ice Spikes are generally diagonal, making them look as if they are reaching out towards someone or something.
Normally, water freezes uniformly when still, and creates a relatively smooth, flat surface. However, there is a very occasional chance for an ice spike to form. 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 only has this hole to expand through, the ice juts out through the hole as it expands, creating a spike.
The title text mocks people who look for complex phenomena in quantum mechanics to determine the origins and definitions of free will and consciousness, being blinded to the natural beauty and complex phenomena of the perceptible world.
Transcript
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This is one of 28 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
[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.]
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 an upside-down trapezoid, and on the right side, the bowl is growing a large diagonal spike, the tip of which hangs over the edge of the bowl.]
Header: Phase change in practice
Blondie: When water freezes, it sometimes sends out long weird spikes.
Physics tell us the water is "trying to give us a present."
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Heyyyyyyy, new comic! --DollarStoreBa'alconverse 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)
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