IQ 400; Ice IV

Brain Wave, 4.

"'...the IQ concept is only valid within a limited range; to speak of an IQ of 400 really doesn't make sense, intelligence on that level may not be intelligence at all as we know it now, but something else.'" (p. 43)

Everything exists only within a limited range.

"...under a pressure of a million atmospheres, at a temperature of 94 degrees below zero Fahrenheit...the best structural steel is a friable, talc-like powder, and aluminum becomes a peculiar transparent substance that splits at a tap; water, on the other hand, becomes Ice IV, a dense, opaque white medium which will deform to a heavy stress, but will break only under impacts huge enough to lay whole Earthly cities waste."

-James Blish, Year 2018! (London, 1964), 2, pp. 32-33.

Hegel said that quantitative changes become qualitative changes. In Year 2018!, the Jovian Bridge is built neither of steel nor of aluminum but of water: Ice IV. An IQ of 400 would, quite obviously, be something that we will know nothing about unless and until we encounter it which would mean that, in Brain Wave, Poul Anderson is free to imagine anything whatsoever. However, all his conclusions follow logically from his premises.