3144: Phase Changes

2025-09-21T10:07:41Z

2A00:F29:1025:F1AD:9D63:1F52:CB54:E17B: /* Transcript */ added a missing s

{{comic
| number = 3144
| date = September 19, 2025
| title = Phase Changes
| image = phase_changes_2x.png
| imagesize = 409x341px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = 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==
{{incomplete|This page was created in a Minecraft Ice Spikes Biome. Don't remove this notice too soon.}}

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 {{w|ice spike}}s. 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 only has 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 dictacted by the initial dominant plane of ice-crystalisation, 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 ({{w|Roger Penroses}}'s theory of {{w|Orchestrated objective reduction}}) or infinite cosmologies 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."

{{comic discussion}}<noinclude>
[[Category: Comics featuring Blondie]]
[[Category: Physics]]

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3144: Phase Changes