(no subject)
Here's a thing.
Ice-nine was an idea chemist Irving Langmuir came up with to entertain H.G. Wells in hopes he'd use it in a story. It didn't take. After both were dead, Kurt Vonnegut took it up and wrote Cat's Cradle around it. Sometime around then, the Soviets developed a thing called polywater, a configuration of water that hypothetically resembled ice-nine, and folks were afraid that it might result in the same disastrous effects ice-nine brought to the world in Vonnegut's book. It turned out to be a mistake, and polywater is now used as an example of pathological science, which is pretty much when cognitive dissonance and psuedoscience get together and have a baby. The term "pathological science" was first coined by Irving Langmuir.
Busy, busy, busy...
Ice-nine was an idea chemist Irving Langmuir came up with to entertain H.G. Wells in hopes he'd use it in a story. It didn't take. After both were dead, Kurt Vonnegut took it up and wrote Cat's Cradle around it. Sometime around then, the Soviets developed a thing called polywater, a configuration of water that hypothetically resembled ice-nine, and folks were afraid that it might result in the same disastrous effects ice-nine brought to the world in Vonnegut's book. It turned out to be a mistake, and polywater is now used as an example of pathological science, which is pretty much when cognitive dissonance and psuedoscience get together and have a baby. The term "pathological science" was first coined by Irving Langmuir.
Busy, busy, busy...