[energyscholar]

Exactly right. The phase transition analogy is powerful precisely because it's not just analogy — the same mathematical operators that describe water at criticality also describe markets approaching crashes, ecosystems approaching collapse, and cardiac rhythms approaching fibrillation.

What surprised us was how many fields derived this independently. The superheated water intuition you describe maps directly to what ecologists call "critical slowing down" and what financial engineers call "increased autocorrelation near instability." Same math, three different names, minimal cross-citation.