Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

[james_davis_nicoll]

A writer documents a brilliant scientist's final gift to the world.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Comments

[glaurung]

“terrible made-up science for the purpose of the story.”
You mean like nearly all of science fiction since the beginning of the genre?

[patrick_morris_miller]

I suspect what got N&P so torqued was that Vonnegut didn't make his rubber science sciencey enough for their tastes.

[ba_munronoe]

Yeah, but Vonnegut doesn't pretend it isn't silly.

[carbonel]

*sigh* I knew someone would say that.

No, I don't. I prefer stories with cleverly made-up science for the purpose of the story. Vonnegut never bothered with that. Neither did Douglas Adams. Both have written works that are highly respected, but not for anything having to do with believability.

[(Anonymous)]

Why was ice 9 silly?

(It gave me nightmares as a kid --- I was so reassured that it didnt exist. So it goes.)

Honest question: At what level of understanding of statistical mechanics does it become implausible? If any? I mean, given the temperature that regular ice forms at, how do you predict that there isn't a meta-stable form that freezes at room temperature?

(Vonnegut was amazing, and the morality and activism of each of his books remarkable. I adored them when I read them, and I learned so much. Including some of the cultural mores of the mid-west of the USA, a truly mythical place.)

[(Anonymous)]

I can’t speak for water per se - it has weird properties but it’s also incredibly ubiquitous- but new polymorphs give industrial chemists nightmares. Look up ritonavir as the classic example, but it’s a frequent problem in late stage process chemistry.

As far as “classical” sf goes, Cat’s Cradle is a pretty good introduction to a really creepy phenomenon.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks! Enlightening answer.

Just browsed wikipidea on ritonavir. So the interesting behavior is `form i' transitioning to form ii,if even a trace of it is present? Totally cool, totally terrifying, so ice nine.

Is there a brief explanation why the less stable structures exist in the wild at all? The physical world is consistently surprising.

I probably should have asked not ` how do you predict that there isn't' but `how do you show that there isn't'. Or even 'can we show'? (Is it like one of the Clay problems, on mass gaps, or Navier-Stokes, or some such, where we honestly have no idea).

Thanks for your answer!

[brooksmoses]

In the case of ritonavir, the less stable structures exist because of very careful assembly at the molecular level by living cells. Life is very good at making lots of only-meta-stable things, in part because they are really useful as energy storage that will do something specific and useful later.

[(Anonymous)]

More creepy than that. Form I was stable for years - long enough for it to be tested and approved and sold as an AIDS drug. And then one day - like ice-9 driving out “our” ice - form I couldn’t be made anymore. The manufacturer went so far as to build a new plant in a different part of the world, only for form ii to start appearing after a bit. (Rumor has it that they - stupidly- flew someone who had been in the old plant to the new one, but the general consensus is that it was just a matter of time.) This was, I should stress, an AIDS drug, and people’s lives depended on it. Process chemistry is not easy, and years of work goes into developing the best way to make a drug - not only does it need to be bioavailable (a problem with form ii) but different crystal forms could also incorporate different levels of impurities and byproducts, which could be harmful to patients. Having to redo things after a drug is on the market not because the route is cheaper or easier but because you just can’t make the old drug anymore is devastating for everyone, and the politics at the time put massive pressure on the company to solve the problem immediately.

The technical term is “disappearing polymorphs,” and the explanation I’ve seen is that the first structure that’s formed upon drying is often the least stable, like if you pile a bunch of stuff together it might settle with time, but once another form is found it will just float around and seed everywhere else. We’ve got software these days that tries to predict possible polymorphs, but it’s not a certainty, and theoretically a lot of other compounds could just one day find another polymorph. (Emphasis on theoretically. In practice, it’s a mostly stochastic process, and if stuff has been around on Earth as a pure compound for long enough it’s probably found all the polymorphs that exist.)

IANA crystallographer; I am a chemist who works with process chemists. Technical errors are my own.

[brooksmoses]

Wow, that is deeply creepy, indeed!

[patrick_morris_miller]

Chemistry is stranger than we imagine. Biology is stranger than we can imagine.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you. `disappearing polymorphs' made my day, a new term for me.

I didnt understand the resolution of the form ii/form i problems with ritonavar; I probably browsed the wiki article too superficially. How does replacing a capsule with a gelcap prevent form ii reversion? (This was different from the other, later, solution hinted at in the article, melt extrusion).

(Does working with process chemists mean you too work for a pharmaceutical company, or are you distanced by being in academia or independent consulting?)

Very informative thread! Thank you so much for the substantial content, new to me at least.

[(Anonymous)]

Not pharma, but other industry. Polymorphs are a problem other people deal with, I just hear them talk about it sporadically. And you’re welcome! Ritonavir is a fascinating (and horrifying) textbook case.

I misspoke slightly- form i doesn’t convert into form ii directly, but once form i goes into solution, it will crystallize again as form ii if you dry it. (The commentator upthread was right - ice-9 would solidify the oceans, but ice caps would remain “our” ice unless they temporarily thawed.) I assume the gel cap meant it was in solution rather than a solid (like a sugar syrup rather than a sugar cube - both form i and ii will be soluble in some solvents at a certain concentration, even if they’re not equivalent), which would explain the need for refrigeration. The extrusion was actually really clever- they figured out you could force the compound to crystallize as form i if there was already a lot of form i around (to act as a seed crystal), so instead of creating a large vat of solution and adding in a bit of form i the way people often do, they started with a small amount of form i and added the solution in dropwise so form i was the only thing created.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you, again. So interesting.

[brooksmoses]

I believe the statistical-mechanics reasoning for why it is implausible is loosely this: If there was some arrangement of water molecules that would catalyze nearby water molecules to join it like that, it would have already happened by random chance, and would probably happen within an isolated cup of water in less than a second, just because of how many water molecules there are and how much they are moving.

Note that this is similar to the argument for why nanotech "grey goo" is a non-possibility. If such unstoppable consumption of everything were possible within the energy limitations of what's available at that scale, bacteria would already be doing it.

It is not implausible (at least, at that level of understanding) for there to be a meta-stable form of ice that remains frozen at room temperature and pressure. What is implausible is that if you toss it in liquid water, you will get more of it rather than having it melt. The only plausible scenario is that you could make it by doing some complicated dance of temperatures and pressures that are very different from "room" conditions and carefully then not poking it too hard while acclimating it back to the room. And, like supercooled water in reverse, if you dropped a drop of liquid water on it it would probably immediately all melt.

[philrm]

You wouldn't even necessarily have to be careful about not poking it too hard, if there's a large activation energy barrier. Diamonds are metastable under the conditions at the Earth's surface, but dusting a diamond with graphite isn't going to cause it to change state.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

By 'believability', doing you mean 'scientific plausibility'? You know. Like ftl.

[carbonel]

No, I actually mean, "make the reader believe it" plausibility. FTL that involves wormholes is believable. FTL that involves magical algae makes me roll my eyes, but the author does a decent job of sidestepping how it actually works. FTL that involves tapping your heels three times and saying "There's no place Trafalmadore"? Satire with SF trappings.

All IMO, of course.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

I must be atypical in my beliefs; ftl is not only not believable, it is ludicrously unbelievable. Why you would think otherwise (you're free to give your reasons for what I think of as a rather astonishing statement) I have no idea. Do you mean to say that ftl is grandfathered in as hard sf? Like legacy admissions at Harvard?

[roseembolism]

That just means the particular magical incantations that invoke FTL are to your liking, because they use the correct magical term of "wormhole". It's like the magician using Tesla coils and a turbine hum vs a wand and "abracadabra!" when making her assistant disappear; it's the same flim-flam either way.

[philrm]

"Wormhole" is not a magical term: they have been the subject of serious scientific research for decades. Although the consensus now is that traversable wormholes cannot exist, that conclusion is itself the result of years of research. You don't have to believe in FTL (I do not) to recognize there's a difference between using concepts that are at least based in physics (however speculative) and egregious nonsense like interstellar drives powered by algae or the energy of the passengers walking around, or believing that astronomers look through telescopes, or that that the separation of Earth and Mars is a significant fraction of the distance to the stars, or not understanding what "vacuum" means, or that starships will simply come to a stop if the engines shut down - all examples from supposed SF novels. (Also every JJ Abrams SF film ever.)

[glaurung]

I never will understand people who insist on a "scientific plausibility" or "believability" pecking order for SF. Rather than get all snooty about which writers are more or less "believable," why not just enjoy good stories well told?

[brooksmoses]

Because some of us enjoy the "if this is physically plausible, what are the logical ramifications that it would cause, and how would that affect what's also possible?" explorations that are generally part of making it more believable.

Or, in short, because some of us also enjoy good fictional science, well told.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

So why do you think ftl is 'physically plausible'? Is time travel 'physically plausible'? How about psionics? De gustibus yadda yadda is certainly true. But it derives from personal, idiosyncratic, experience, right. Ask a biologist and a physcist what they think of the plausability of some sf-derived movie and the one will reply the biology was nonsensical but the physics seemed accurate, the other will reply in the opposite. Also, what you imprinted on during your golden age.

[brooksmoses]

I think you missed that I was proposing a different definition than carbonel -- I was
referring to fictional science, and the "if this is physically plausible" is an exploration of a specifically-chosen counterfactual.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Ook. I have no problem with a story having FTL in it - it's necessary if your hero is going to go to Tau Ceti and be back while her girlfriend is still a girl - and it can be fun to explore the consequences of the particular rubber science an author sprinkles over their FTL to disguise the taste of fantasy. It's the guys who go into tor.com threads and blather about wOrMhOlEs and AlCuBiErRrE that make me ralph.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

No, I did not miss it. Any handwave that results in ftl is highly implausible. Now, I know what you're going to say: that no, you're wrong, it is plausible. So where does that leave us? Do we get into an argument now, or do we simply let each other enjoy their brand of fictionication in peace?

[brooksmoses]

I find it fascinating that you believe I'm going to say that it is plausible, when I just said that a claim that it's plausible was counterfactual -- i.e., not true in our reality -- but whatever. I was answering a question from glaurung.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

I find it fascinating that you don't know what a modus ponens argument is. Do you want to keep going or are we done?

[brooksmoses]

Wow.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

"if this is physically plausible, what are the logical ramifications that it would cause, and how would that affect what's also possible?" explorations that are generally part of making it more believable.

Those are your words, are they not?

Wow yourself. And shrug. Enjoy reading what you like reading. I'll enjoy what I like reading. That is all.