Archives for: "Mar 02 2022"

Bentley’s Most Singular Observation

March 2nd, 2022
[This is the seventh and last in the series of re-posted articles, from 2012.] You don’t have to look at frosted surfaces for very long before coming across something like the following. The picture shows a large ice crystal amid a roughly uniform sea… more »

Why six?

March 2nd, 2022
[This is the sixth in the series of re-posted articles, from 2011.] Why do so many snow crystals look about the same when rotated by 1/6 of a turn? What’s the origin of the six-fold symmetry? Why not five or seven, as Kepler asked(1)? Since it always… more »