Years ago, Les got The Physics of Christmas – and this would have made a nice subchapter to that book. This isn’t strictly Christmas-y…but it’s cool. About -40°, to be precise.
I’ve just washed my blog and can’t do a thing with it, so I’ve had all these random thoughts that have piled up. This one, I figured, would make a good addition to a site which has the categories “Science” and “Neato”.
ps – I apologize profusely to all of those who live in colder climes and routinely have to shovel this stuff off their driveways, cars, and small children. I know that living in central California for most of my life has… shall we say… not properly introduced me to the realities of lotsandlots of falling snow.
Thanks for the links- snowflakes are perpetually fascinating. I hope we get some here for Christmas, but it doesn’t look good…
I’m no physicist, but after reading
from the link above, my memory was jogged, and I found more info in Phillip Ball’s great book “H2O- a Biography of Water”. He says that this isn’t the whole story:
Coordination because of vibrations bouncing around the crystal lattice- it doesn’t get cooler than that.