Today's ornament from the Tree of SCIENCE!!! is in honor of the cold water dripping into our kitchen cabinet yesterday:
That's a glass icicle, with bonus dramatic shadows. If you're a homeowner, you might think that this stands for ice damming, but this is about SCIENCE!!! not property mishaps. This ornament stands for phase transitions.
Phase transitions are a big part of physics and chemistry. Exactly what constitutes a "phase of matter" is a little murky, and seems to proceed on a sort of Damon Knight/ Potter Stewart rule, but transitions between phases are a rich area of study. Solid to liquid, liquid to gas, normal fluid to superfluid, thermal vapor to Bose-Einstein Condensate-- you name it, there's a community dedicated to studying it.
This ornament is particularly appropriate, because it's a striking representation of the freezing/melting transition in water (icicles result from water melting in a warm spot, flowing to a cold one, and then re-freezing), but it's also made of glass, and the glass transition is a whole area of study unto itself.
(You could also add meteorology as a bonus extra SCIENCE!!! for this particular ornament, as icicle formation is highly weather-dependent....)
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go check the bucket I put out to catch the ice melt.