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."

Comments

Re:Anti-Cold

[NanoGator]

"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.

Killer Instinct is Robert Roy Britt?

[Osty]

From the article submission:

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.

And from the actual article itself:

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 today, 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.

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:

Killer Instinct writes "Ever wonder how ice melts? From the article: '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.'"

Re:Killer Instinct is Robert Roy Britt?

[FFFish]

Gosh, I'd thought it was the editor's responsibility to check legitimacy and attribution were correct.

Ah, as usual....

[jtbauki]

...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?

Bad reporting?

[Nigel Stepp]

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.

Re:Hmmmmm...

[poopdeville]

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.

How, not why

[thomasdn]

Until now, scientists could not explain why ice cubes in your drink melt.

Scientists does not explain why things happen. Only how.

Re:Wait...

[jpostel]

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.