Gosh, I’d like to believe this one, it’s just such a “cool” idea. One argument against this idea is that if you take thousands of pictures of snowflakes, it’s still not a very good statistical sample. Kenneth Fuller writes about this, and other modern myths taught as science. He hypothesized that this myth arose from the publication of a wide sample of snow crystals by Wilson Bently in 1931. Bently only published his very best pictures, which were taking from a specific type of storm. While the final result was astounding (6000 photographs), this is not a very good sample when you consider all the snowflakes that have ever existed in the world.
A counter-argument (which Fuller rejects) is that on the molecular level, no two snowflakes will ever be quite the same, because some of the water molecules will be slightly different from the others (e.g., they’ll contain an isotope of hydrogen or oxygen). Fuller poo-poos this idea, since it also says that no two drops of water are exactly alike, which begs the question of whether or not the beautiful symmetrical crystal, above, might be replicated from one snowflake to the next.
However, the math of combinatorics comes into play when you consider all the different ways that a snow crystal might form. By that, I mean that as each snow crystal forms, it has several different “choices” about how to continue its growth. There are many crystal structures available, and different paths that each crystal may take as it continues its growth. So, there is a huge number of different crystal structures that could arise. Snow researcher Kenneth Librecht from Caltech claims at Snowcrystals.com that it’s statistically unlikely that two snowflakes might be exactly the same (even though we could never actually check them all to make sure).
See some beautiful (public domain) pictures of snowflakes at Wikimedia Commons.
Find out how to preserve a snowflake for 30 years with superglue on a later post.
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I think you mean Fuller “pooh-poohs” the idea, not “poo-poos.” Poo-poo means to defecate.
May I have permission to use your photograph of this snowflake for a power point presentation. It would be used on a welcome slide for a church group gathering this week in Duluth Minnesota.
Thanks.
Hi Laurel,
All my images are taken from Wikimedia Commons, which is licensed under the Creative Commons. Usually I link back to the original image there but I neglected to do so for that post. But take a look here for a bunch of open license images on snowflakes, including the one on my post.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Snowflake
Although it sounds overly simplistic: No two objects can be completely identical, no matter how much they are alike.
I agree with the concept that you are presenting that there may be, or have been, identical snowflakes. Statistically the number of snowflakes being generated at one time must be enormous, somewhere in the trillions I am sure. Given this large number and the length of time that snowflakes have been falling on Earth (billions of years), it appears logical to assume that water molecules would have arranged themselves in an identical fashion, at least twice, for the production of a snowflake. And if you consider snowflake development, the very earliest stages of ice crystal formation must have produced many, many duplicate crystals. It is only when they become twinned and more complicated that they begin to diverge in shapes.
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