Ice-nine

Ice-nine is a fictional material appearing in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. It is supposed to be a more stable polymorph of water than common ice (Ice I_h) which instead of melting at 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees 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.

Nonfiction

• While multiple polymorphs of ice do exist (they can be created under pressure), none has the properties described in this book, and none is 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.
• The rock band the Grateful Dead set up a publishing company called Ice Nine (in tribute to Vonnegut's story). [1]

In other media

• Chris Mars' 1993 album 75% Less Fat includes a song called No More Mud which is entirely about Ice-Nine and makes numerous references to the characters of the book.
• Joe Satriani's album Surfing With the Alien includes a song called Ice 9.
• The One O'Clock Lab Band at UNT performed an original jazz composition called "Ice-Nine" (composed by Steve Weist) on their grammy nominated album "Lab 2009" which is sold exclusively through Penders Music Company
• The video game 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors uses ice-9 as a major plot element, with similar attributes to Vonnegut's original ice-nine.
• The 2003 film The Recruit features a computer virus named Ice-9 in tribute to Vonnegut's ice-nine that would erase hard drives and travel through power sources which are not protected; possibly erasing every computer on Earth.
• The Season 4 Episode "Ice" of the American television show Alias revolves around a chemical named Ice-Five with the same effect as Vonnegut's Ice-Nine.
• Red Mage, a main character in the popular web comic series 8-Bit Theater can and has used a spell known as "Ice-9" which will stop all thermal activity of the dimension it's used in.
• Ice-9 appears in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume III: Century. It forms the tomb of Golden Age superhero Stardust.
• A band, Ice Nine Kills, is named after Vonnegut's weapon of mass destruction.
• Israeli neo-glam band, Kerakh-9, was named after the substance.
• Some part of the Scheme programming language implementation GNU Guile is named ice-9 with regard to the crystallization effect of Vonnegut's invention [2].

Other fields

• In Biology prions are linked conceptually to Ice-nine (which is often used as a fictional example of prions in the classroom). This is because prions and Ice-nine are both self-propagating alternate forms of a material (water in the case of ice-nine and a protein in the case of prions)

See also

• Planet killer
• Polywater
• Tiberium
• Sodium acetate
• Prion

References

Further reading

• Lansbury PT, Caughey B (January 1995). "The chemistry of scrapie infection: implications of the 'ice 9' metaphor". Chem. Biol. 2 (1): 1–5. doi:10.1016/1074-5521(95)90074-8. PMID 9383397. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/1074-5521(95)90074-8.