Nucleation: Turning Water to Ice
When we think of water turning into ice, people tend to think of a natural phenomenon that isn’t all that interesting. Ice cools our drinks to a nice point of enjoyment. Ice can help heal that burn when you thought it was a good idea to play with fire as a kid. Ice is a normal part of life.
One cool thing about water, though, is that it doesn’t always freeze. In fact, water can stay liquid below its freezing point. This weird phenomenon happens when water is super-duper pure and has no contaminants. You see, water needs something that isn’t itself to start the phase transition from water to ice. Small particles like dust, even bacteria, start the chain of formation — we call this nucleation.
The water looks at the dust particle and shouts “Hey other liquid molecules, I think we need to form around this circular thing so we can become ice.” The liquid molecules then link together, one by one, until a massive network of bonds are created and ice is formed.
How beautiful.
As many things do, this got me thinking about life and people.
Interconnected People
When I first started reading articles on Medium, there was a large amount of pieces about optimizing learning and brain hacking. That corpus of information is definitely growing everyday, but a lot of it is redundant. Nowadays, I have to read about 3 or 4 or more to get something that I haven’t seen before.
In my opinion, that is okay. It’s about reading and supporting the community, however, it does shed some light on learning. Incrementally, there is decreasing return once you start exhausting the tactic that you first used to learn. Or, in another sense, there is a smaller probability that the next article about “5 ways to improve your learning” will be novel.
The next step to solve this problem would be to have an
But is there something further that we can do?
Imagine a hierarchy of knowledge. You have your experts up top — those who do the actual research and are on the cutting edge of learning about behavior and the brain. Then you have your leaders who disseminate the information to us. We, in a sense, are the common people and consumers of this type of information. This is an over simplification as I am sure there other ways to view this flow of information, but you get my analogy.
As this information flows down, less and less of the core idea becomes esoteric while more and more of it becomes consumable. Medical jargon morph into buzzwords. PhD sentences change into clickable Medium titles.
It sounds inefficient, and it is.
Maybe we can take from the process water uses nucleation to turn into ice. Maybe we can have a catalyst for change within our own network.
Maybe in the future, there will be a way to exchange this information through an interconnected web of people. The nucleation site is the paper that discovers a new behavior trick that will allow one to process information quicker. Somehow, everyone who was interested in this area now has integrated this new knowledge into their daily life. Instantly.
Stay with me.
An information or knowledge network then emerges. Then, the brain integrates this new methodology, and we all life happily ever after.
That sounds more efficient.
Sure this may have been thought of before, but that is because I am just a product of our currently inefficient state. In the future, words will be repeated less because the people will have already tapped into this knowledge, simultaneously, together. Weird, right?
Watch nucleation happen with a horse.
