On 07 Feb 2023 17:56:02 -0400, Mike Spencer
<
mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> wrote:
Which one ?
This one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle
"After World War II, Kurt Vonnegut worked in the public relations
department for General Electric research company. GE hired scientists
and let them do pure research, and his job was to interview these
scientists and find good stories about their research. Vonnegut felt
that the older scientists were indifferent about the ways their
discoveries might be used.
When science fiction author H. G. Wells visited the labs in the 30s,
the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir suggested for him the
idea of a story about a form of ice stable at room temperature. Wells
never took it any further, but Vonnegut's older brother Bernard, who
was Langmuir's junior colleague at GE, remembered and told him about
it.
After both the author and the scientist had died, Vonnegut thought to
himself "Finders, keepers - the idea is mine".[7] Langmuir himself
would become the model for Dr. Felix Hoenikker. Vonnegut said in an
interview with The Nation that "Langmuir was absolutely indifferent to
the uses that might be made of the truths he dug out of the rock and
handed out to whoever was around, but any truth he found was beautiful
in its own right, and he didn't give a damn who got it next."[8]
Dr. Felix Hoenikker's fictional invention of ice-nine was similar in
name only to the real substance ice IX, one of a number of variant
structures for ice. Langmuir had worked on seeding ice crystals to
diminish or increase rain or storms.[9][10][11]
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