Physicists trying to create the perfect snowflake
Nothing in nature is perfect — but frosty, shimmery snowflakes come pretty close. Now one man is trying to push the limits of those shimmery, symmetrical ice crystals, to make the largest, most perfectly symmetrical snowflake ever, according to foxnews.com.
Kenneth Libbrecht, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, who has spent years trying to create such symmetrical beauties in his lab, said he was inspired by snowflakes he encountered in his hometown of Fargo, North Dakota.
By carefully controlling the conditions, using commercial recirculating chillers and temperature controllers, he has managed to create 0.5 inch — across snowflakes that retain their pristine symmetry.
But that isn’t big enough for him: Libbrecht believes he can make symmetrical crystals as big as one inch across or more.
Libbrecht said, “There are no physical laws that prevent the formation of arbitrarily large snowflakes, but just a slight change in the environmental conditions can make flakes turn out wonky.
“It’s easy to grow an ugly snowflake. More things go wrong as they get bigger.”
That said, in 2006, NASA scientists measured snowflakes in Ontario, Canada, and found that individual snow crystals of about 0.6 inches are not unusual. And not all of them were ugly.
Outside the lab, snow forms high in the atmosphere when crystals form on particles of dirt or dust in the atmosphere.
As the burgeoning crystal falls, it encounters an ever-changing set of conditions that continually nudges the snowflake to form in one way or another, which is why no two flakes are alike.