Do you wanna build a snowflake?
Most of us look at a snowflake, think, “Huh, that’s pretty,” and go on with other things. Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, however, just couldn’t…wait for it…let it go. Fascinated by how they grow, and grow uniquely, this professor of physics at Caltech is now a “snowflake scientist” (an unofficial title, he stresses).
Libbrecht was hired by Disney to ensure that in their movie full of trolls and ice monsters, the snowflakes at least were realistic. And he was pleased to see that they listened to him: it is apparently a common mistake to draw snowflakes as eight-pointed when in fact they are six, so you’re basically doing the frozen-water equivalent of calling a spider an insect. But in reverse. Kind of. Okay, I really didn’t think that analogy through super-effectively. But I’m not the scientist here. The guy in the video above is.
So why do snowflakes grow the way they do? We still don’t know. So it could be, theoretically, that a rejected ice queen is indeed the source of them…but probably not. In the end, it actually takes a whole bunch of lab equipment to do it on command.
Who knew that dealing with flakes all day could be awesome? Your unique comments on the matter are like individual snowflakes to us, so leave us a flurry below. The cold never bothers us anyway.
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Featured image: Disney
The LORD OF THE RINGS and FROZEN Mashup Parody by THE HILLYWOOD SHOW
