ice 9

( phase diagram )

It turns out that ice IX does actually exist, as do ice I through XII, though thankfully it does not have the properties described by Vonnegut. Bree tells me that Kurt's brother Bernard was an atmospheric chemist who studied, among other things, cloud seeding—maybe that's where Kurt got the idea. [Above figure from the textbook Thermodynamics and an introduction to thermostatistics, second edition, by Herbert Callen.]

continuum mechanics

I am convinced that Mechanical Engineers developed their mathematics on another planet. The above figure illustrates the three eigenvalues of a 3x3 matrix. [From Continuum Mechanics for Engineers by Mase and Mase.]