5/20/2023 0 Comments Snowflake ilikeSlender columns grow in a different way, with fast-growing faces and slower-growing edges. ![]() Crystals grow into flat stars and plates (rather than three-dimensional structures) when the edges grow outward quickly while the faces grow upward slowly. In low humidity, stars form few branches and resemble hexagonal plates, but in high humidity, the stars grow more intricate, lacy designs.Īccording to Libbrecht, the reason for the various crystal shapes also began to come into focus after Nakaya’s pioneering work. The columns form at −5 C and again at about −30 C. Nakaya found that stars tend to form at −2 degrees Celsius and −15 C. He tinkered with humidity and temperature settings to grow the two main crystal types and assembled his seminal catalog of possible shapes. By midcentury, Nakaya was producing snowflakes in a lab, using individual rabbit hairs to suspend frost crystals in refrigerated air where they could grow into full-fledged snowflakes. ![]() Then, in the 1930s, the Japanese researcher Ukichiro Nakaya began a systematic study of the different snow crystal types. Kepler wondered if something similar was taking place in snowflakes, and whether their six sides could be pinned on the arrangement of “the smallest natural unit of a liquid like water.”ĭrawings of diverse snowflakes by the Japanese physicist Ukichiro Nakaya, who conducted a decades-long study of the different types. Hexagonal patterns seemed the best way to pack spheres closely together, Harriot found, and he corresponded about it with Kepler. Around 1584, Harriot sought the most efficient way to stack cannonballs on Raleigh’s ship decks. He would have recalled a letter from his contemporary Thomas Harriot, an English scientist and astronomer who, among many roles, served as a navigator for the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh. “There must be a cause why snow has the shape of a six-cornered starlet. ![]() In 1611, Kepler offered a New Year’s gift to his patron, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II: an essay called “The Six-Cornered Snowflake.” Kepler writes that he noticed a snowflake on his lapel as he crossed Prague’s Charles Bridge and could not help but muse on its geometry. But the first scientist to try to understand why this happens was probably Johannes Kepler, the German scientist and polymath. “Flowers of plants and trees are generally five-pointed, but those of snow, which are called ying, are always six-pointed,” wrote the scholar Han Yin. in China, according to Libbrecht’s research. The earliest recorded musings on these delicate shapes date to 135 B.C. Illustration: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine, adapted from Kenneth Libbrecht
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