Icebreaking meme

Recently, Professor M.V. Vinarsky drew attention to the existence of scientific memes, i.e., visual or verbal images that clearly identify a specific scientific theory or scientist in the public consciousness. He suggested that scientific memes can only appear for scientific events that are most important in terms of worldview. The present article shows that such memes can also exist in engineering sciences, for example in marine ice engineering. An example is the persistent belief that an icebreaker destroys the ice cover with its weight. The paper examines the possible causes of this “icebreaking” meme, as well as the reasons why the information it contains scarcely reflect real processes. At the end of the work, hypotheses are put forward about the possible reasons for the emergence of scientific memes. Moreover, the present probability of emergence for new scientific memes is concluded extremely low.