Here’s a wild phenomenon I didn’t know before: In crystallography and materials science, a polymorph is a solid function that can exist in more than one crystal structure while maintaining the same chemical composition. Diamond and graphite are two polymorphs of carbon. Diamond is polished with carbon in an isometric structure and graphite is polished with carbon in a tetragonal structure. Now imagine one day your wife’s diamond ring turns to graphite! That is not possible with carbon but it happens with other polymorphs where the metastable (local) stable version is replaced by the stable version.
The drug ritonavir originally used for AIDS (and part of the COVID drug Paxlovid), for example, was created in 1996 but by 1998 was no longer in production. Despite the best efforts of the manufacturer, Abbott, every time they tried to develop the old ritonavir a shiny new version (form II) was produced that was medically ineffective. The problem was that once form II was present it was almost impossible to remove it and the small particles of form II ritonavir blocked any attempt to make form I.
Form II was sufficiently low in potency that it was impossible to produce Form I in any laboratory where Form II was introduced, even indirectly. Scientists who had been exposed to Form II in the past seemed to contaminate all productive plants with their presence, perhaps because they carried invisible seed crystals of the new polymorph.
Wikipedia continues:
In the 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, a fan learns about Ice-nine, another water structure that is solid at room temperature and acts like a seed crystal when it comes in contact with ordinary liquid water, causing that liquid water to freeze quickly and turn into more Ice-nine. . Later in the book, a character frozen in Ice-nine falls into the ocean. Soon, all the water in the seas, rivers, and underground water turned into solid Ice-nine, leading to a climactic doomsday situation.
Given the last point perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that a hat tip goes to Eliezer Yudkowsky who worries about such things.
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