Slashdot Mirror
How Ice Melts
Killer Instinct writes "Ever wonder how ice melts? Until now, scientists could not explain why ice cubes in your drink melt. They've known the basics, but the details remained elusive. A breakthrough new study, announced yesterday, supports a leading theory that melting starts when the fundamental structure of matter begins to crack. Melting is considered a basic phenomenon in physics. An understanding of how it works is crucial to gaining a firm grasp on the physical world."
"Not really. But I have a hypothesis that it has something to do with heat or as I call it, "anti-cold."
I like how people bitch about the lack of 'news for nerds' on this site lately. Then, when something comes along that's truely nerd worthy, everybody becomes a smart ass.
"Derp de derp."
From the article submission:
And from the actual article itself: Those look pretty similar to me! Given that the article submission is word-for-word exactly from the article itself, it's fair to assume that the submitter, Killer Instinct, is the same person as the author of the article, Robert Roy Britt. How else could the same text be attributed to two supposedly different people?If you're going to submit an article, summarize it in your own words. If you're just going to paste in the first few sentences of the article, attribute them to the proper author by using a phrase such as, "Quoted from the article: 'insert quote here'." Removing line breaks is not enough to satisfy the "summarize in your own words" criteria.
Here's an example of what the submission should've looked like if Slashdot cared at all about given proper attribution for written text:
...smartass slashdotters crack jokes about a new discovery to hide their own insecurities. I, for one, freely admit I have no idea how ice melts.
1+1=2 anyone?
This article is too bad; there's probably an interesting result here, but it appears to be shrouded in vagueness and analogy.
It's true that the *exact* mechanism for melting has not been "seen", but the concepts really are well known. Our models are good enough that computer simulations can be very accurate. I have seen several which show features such as surface melting, for instance.
Also, it is absolutely expected that melting begin at defects, but this does not mean that "melting begins below the melting point" as the article suggests. These areas are locally amorphous and there is no reason that they should begin melting at the crystal's melting point. Really, it's all in the free energy equations.
I'm guessing that the real result has been butchered by the article.
4096R/EF7BAFA6 79E1 DF98 D09D 898F 9A11 F6F0 DDDC 23FA EF7B AFA6
Wow... I just realized that I read a whole article about ice melting... And I was interested. I guess that's what you're reduced to when you have nothing to do but read Slashdot at midnight on a Friday...
Sometimes you've gotta roll the hard six.
An understanding of how it works is crucial to gaining a firm grasp on the physical world.
I did not RTFA, and now I feel like I am tripping on acid - swallowing colors of the sound I hear, I am just a crazy guy.
Slashdot, it's better than drugs!
It will make you innn-sane!!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This could have all sorts of ramifications in materials science. If a good model for macroscopic melting is found, we might be able to design processes to alloy metals much more resistant to heat than are currently possible, for instance.
After all, I am strangely colored.
No, in fact they are talking about boiling water; a.k.a. 100 degrees Celsius. As people have pointed out, there are two reasons. Evaporation is a cooling process (that's why you sweat), and during evaporation liquid mass takes a gas form, thus there is less of your ice cube to freeze. And distilled water doesn't freeze "faster" it freezes at a higher temperature than water with impurities. Hence, people in the north applying salt to their streets.
Pykrete melts so damn slowly due to the low thermal transfer rate of th wood pulp. Didn't you ever have physics? Don't you read the wikipedia links you paste? ;-)
Until now, scientists could not explain why ice cubes in your drink melt.
Scientists does not explain why things happen. Only how.
thomasdamgaard.dk.
Other planets are more stable (climate wise) then earth, but their normal temperatures are probably too extreme to sustain life.
Venus' orbital eccentricity: 0.00677323
Neptune's 0.00858587
Earth's: 0.01671022
Venus' surface temperature ranges from about 820 degrees to nearly 900 degrees F
Earth's surface temperature ranges from about -80 degrees to around 130 degrees F
Neptune's mean cloud temperature ranges from -315 to -307 degrees F (Temperature varies vastly by cloud elevation, but probably little across the same cloud level)
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
The most terrible spell of all (ICE-9) :
http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=041028
Here's how it works:
http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=041125
And seen in action:
http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=041102
There is a difference between knowing ice melts and knowing why or how. The Greek also knew that every day Apollo would ride his sun-chariot. No need to investigate how he did this exactly.
As the parent said: nerds want to know how stuff works.
News flash!! Still no cure for cancer, but scientists are hard at work discovering how ice melts. Quick somebody start polishing that noble prize!
One of my college professors in materials science, that retired from Bell Labs to teach, used to say, "I'm pretty sure this is how it works, but I'm not positive. If anyone tells you he is positive, he's either lying, or not smart enough to check that the underlying facts are actually suppositions."
He once told us that he didn't really know how resistors worked, but he did know that if he manufactured them using certain materials in a certain process, he could get resistors that were a certain number of ohms. Today resistors are manfactured all over the world pretty much the same way, but the methods were derived from trial and error, and not some deeper understanding and equations for making the best resistor.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)