The First Photographs of Snowflakes Discover the Groundbreaking Microphotography (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The First Photographs of Snowflakes Discover the Groundbreaking Microphotography (2017)

openculture.com

91 points_____k18 comments

Once I had ended up with beautiful snowflakes and crystalline layers, entirely by accident.

I had been washing a bowl in steaming hot water when I got interrupted. So, I did what everyone does when they cannot find an appropriate place for what they have on their hands.

I slapped the empty steaming bowl shut (it came with an airtight lid), put it away in the freezer, the nearest thing that looked like a cabinet with a door, and promptly forgot about it.

A few weeks later I found that both the bowl and the lid were covered with exquisite layers of crystals. I tried hard to photograph them, just did not come out right.

I kept the crystals for many months.

This reminds me of the following, a story from my personal life. My wife and I both ski, and early in our relationship one of us told the other about the coolest poster ever about snowflakes. We each described it. We were sure we were talking about the same one - the one that graphed how snow changes over temperature and helped explain why it can feel so different. One of us pulled it up, and we realized, well...

[1]: https://vermontsnowflakes.com/cdn/shop/products/Snowflake_Th...

[2]: https://physics.montana.edu/demonstrations/video/1_mechanics...

She was talking about #1 (the work of Bentley made into a collage), and I was talking about #2. It turned out to be a pretty good way of thinking about how imperfect communication is, and how hard it is to get on the same page about things that are even more important when all we have is words.

Also worth checking out the Veritasium video on snowflakes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao2Jfm35XeE

The retitling is a mess

The headline does not match the article title and is currently nonsensical.

I might have said that I didn't realize snowflakes took photographs, but it turns out to be the work of Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley, so I guess in this case, they do.

I think I see your reading, but I'd add an apostrophe:

The First Photographs of Snowflake's Discover the Groundbreaking Microphotography

i.e. the first photographs on Snowflake's part. Though that still doesn't resolve how a guy's pictures discovered microphotography, rather than the guy himself.

Enforcement of character limit for the header got it place. I did not want to alter it too much either.

The article title is written as a title and subtitle, separated by a colon.

So the correct title of the article is 'The First Photographs of Snowflakes'.

Oh yes, it looks like I missed the colon during the edit.

The snowflake line is from Chuck Palahniuk's book "Fight Club". In it a character tells another one that they are "not a beautiful and unique snowflake" but part of the same "compost heap". The book was satirising soft soap self-help messaging. Snowflakes do melt easily which has aided it in getting its new meaning.

Are the design of snowflakes a thin slice of some 3D shape defined by a mathematical function?

A snowflake is a 3D recursive growth algorithm over time. The macroscopic shapes are inherent in an earlier seed of molecular structure and arrangement of other factors by chance and circumstance. As they form while falling through the air, I imagine the crystalline shape grows in three dimensions, stretched by gravity or air resistance. So I'd say their design, at any moment, is a slice of a fourth-dimensional structure-over-time that can be described by a mathematical function, which ends in a wet puddle on the ground.

The tetrahedral shape of the molecules define the 6 sides. I believe that would be a constant.

Temperature, moisture, pressure and maybe more variables are the parameters.

What a great Christmas post. The images are very impressive too!

Love Elinor Merle's snowflake earrings.

(2017)

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