Free Republic

Here is one question that probably won't cross the minds of Sasha Cohen, Irina Slutskaya and the other Olympic women figure skaters today, even if they fall: Why is ice slippery? The explanation once commonly dispensed in textbooks turns out to be wrong. And slipperiness is just one of the unanswered puzzles about ice. Besides the everyday ice that you slip on, there are about a dozen other forms, some of which experts suspect exist in the hot interior of Earth or on the surface of Pluto. [snip] Ice, said Robert M. Rosenberg, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Lawrence...