Leave it to one of us Vulcan-hearted, data obsessed science types to eviscerate a child’s school art project, but LiveScience offers us one man’s primer on the accurate and the inaccurate portrayals of snowflakes.
In fact, it’s not just the perhaps four-sided variety of snowflake cut from white paper with rounded tip scissors that gets the what-for from Thomas Koop of Germany’s Bielefeld University. Actually, what set Koop off was a promotional graphic for the scientific journal Nature that featured eight-sided snowflakes, sparking the flurry of criticism.
Koop reminds us that owing to the molecular structure of water, when the temperature drops and the substance changes from liquid to solid state of matter, a set geometric pattern will be revealed. The crystalline structure that will form and grow as the minuscule ice crystal develops into a snowflake will always be hexagonal. While snowflakes are unique (you may, eventually, find two that are similar, but never two that are identical), they will always have a six-sided aspect to them.
Science aside, it’s perfectly fine to just sit and gaze and behold the beauty, and this gallery of snowflake images provides the opportunity to do just that.
Koop’s critical eye doesn’t end with how the snowflake is depicted. As quoted by LiveScience, Koop goes gunning for how raindrops are typically drawn as well:
“The shape of falling rain drops is depicted incorrectly in almost any book that I know of. Most often, they are drawn in a teardrop-like shape, a kind of pinnacle at the top and round at the bottom. However, in reality cloud droplets are spherical because of water’s surface tension and falling rain drops are somewhat flattened at the bottom because of the resistance they feel as they fall through the air.”
Photo courtesy of NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons
