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The surprising link between snow and success
The universe is a strange mix of chaos and order. Somehow, in the aftermath of the Big Bang — a seemingly chaotic event — a galaxy called the Milky Way formed, with stars, solar systems, and the Earth. Yet even with this careful balance of planets and stars, we know that chaos makes it impossible to precisely calculate the gravitational interaction between more than three of these objects at once.
The tiniest movement of a butterfly’s wings can ostensibly trigger a hurricane on the other side of the world, yet we all have an app on our phones that tells us what the weather will be a week from now. Chaos and order live side by side, and our lives are built around these seemingly antagonistic pillars.
I think a wonderful example of this is found in snowflakes. Snow comprises millions of tiny crystals. Each one displaying a beautiful hexagonal crystalline structure. Nature’s proclivity to turn water into these individual six-fold symmetries almost gives the illusion that each was carefully planned and shaped in the clouds then laid on the ground. Of course, this is far from reality. The crystals form by random chance. The microclimate, positions of water molecules and hence the crystal itself are never the same. They are decided by random, turbulent, and unpredictable forces of nature. Snowflakes display a surprising degree of order but they are…
