The Trippy Triple Point

Hello Humans! Today we will be discussing more Chemistry. So, to get some background, there is this cool graph in Chemistry that looks like what you see below, actually it is what you see below. This is called a Phase Diagram. I picked the phase diagram for water, because hopefully you all know what water is and can picture a steaming glacier, boiling water, and a melting ice cube. This shows all of the different combinations of pressure and temperature needed for a molecule to be either a solid, liquid or gas. While on one of the three lines between the different sections, a compound is either going through sublimation and deposition (gas to solid), melting and freezing (solid to liquid), or condensation and vaporization (liquid to gas). However, there are two random points on there. We all know what the boiling point is, so that point isn’t weird. The Critical Point is where a substance is neither a liquid nor a gas, but a supercritical liquid. This means it is both a gas and a liquid. Pretty weird right. Not as trippy as the triple point though. Scientists achieve supercritical liquids all the time, and are used frequently in experiments. The triple point is a whole other story. The definition of a triple point is the temperature and pressure at which the three phases, or solid, liquid, and gas, of a substance coexist in equilibrium. What does this mean? That the substance is simultaneously a liquid, gas, and a solid, and it keeps melting, freezing, vaporizing, condensing, subliming, and decomposing all at the same time. Me and a few of my other nerdy science friends last year at the University, made what we called our “Chemistry Bucket List.” We put things on there that we would like to achieve in chemistry. Some of the things range from burning a banana to blowing up the core of Jupiter, to achieving and maintaining a triple point. Someday I will achieve the triple point of some substance, and it will be trippy. But in the meantime, I can only dream about it. It’s hard to comprehend a substance that is constantly changing from a liquid to a gas to a solid back to a liquid, and keeps going. That’s what makes it so trippy. Stay wild, flower child.