I don’t really know what -illion word to use for how many snowflakes have fallen, but how do we know that out of all of them, no two are alike?
(Sorry if flair is incorrect)
In: Chemistry
The statement itself isn’t true if something has formed once another thing can form again in the same way. The sayings of no two snowflakes or no two finger prints are identical refers to rarity it’s not literal.
Okay, not exactly ELI5, but I’ve tired to find a fairly reliable link: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/alike/alike.htm
Sort answer : because showflakea are so sensitive to temperature changes and other factors as they fall to the ground, changing their shape as they go. It’s not impossible for two to be the same, but the probability is very small.
Small enough for for the notion to exist.
The idea that no two snowflakes are never alike is more about explaining a concept and not really about knowing that there have never been two identical snowflakes. It is about representing the amount of variation possible in a thing – really the more complex something becomes the less likely there is for something to be identical to it. Like every molecule of water is identical but there are so many molecules of water in a snowflake that the chance of another snowflake having the same number and placement of water molecules in it is so unlikely that it doesn’t exist.
Actually that saying is just about it being extremely unlikely. However, in 1988 Nancy Knight , a scientist at the National Center for Atmosphere Research in Boulder, Colorado, USA, found two identical examples while studying snow crystals from a storm in Wisconsin, using a microscope.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/first-indentical-snow-crystals
It’s a statistical statement, not a law of physics, in which the snowflakes communicate with each other, or anything like that.
Let’s use an analogy with playing cards. There are approximately 80,658,175,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different ways of arranging the cards in a deck. If I shuffle well, I can be extremely sure that no two shuffles will result in the same arrangement. Actually I can very sure that all the shuffles done by all the people in the world ever won’t repeat the exact same arrangement.
It’s the same with snowflakes. There are an unimaginably large number of ways a snowflake can arrange itself. While the number of snowflakes is a lot, it’s nowhere’s near that big. So we can be very sure that no two snowflakes are the same.
I’ve wondered the same thing with people, obviously there hasn’t been an exhausting number of people born in comparison to the amount of genetic combinations that make up a person. But how many people would have to be born until there were two people with the same genetic information without being physically related? I’m also assuming that new genetic mutations play a large role in this as well
We don’t – We just assume so because the probability of two being the same is infinitesimal. It’s still technically possible, but the chance is so low that most people just consider it impossible.
This is more of a meme than a scientific fact, but it’s not _just_ an extension of the idea that no two objects are identical because there will always be atoms in different places, etc. There’s a reason we go around saying that “no two _snowflakes_ are identical” and not “no two pebbles or twigs or fish or whatever are identical”.
This reason is that classic big, flat, 6 sided snowflakes come in such a diversity of shapes that if you pop a bunch under a microscope (or even just look at them closely) you will be impressed at a huge diversity of variations on the basic six-sided pattern.
See [this picture](https://i2.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/wilsonbentley_snowflakes22.jpg?resize=680%2C820&ssl=1) or [this one](https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.harvardartmuseums.org/production/file_uploads/Events/images/000/002/188/hero/Homer%20lecture%20with%20Nemerov%20image.jpg) for example. Unlike rocks or fish or twigs, which often look pretty similar even if they aren’t actually identical, snowflakes all _look_ distinctly different from each other.
The reason for this is that the ice crystal growth of a snowflake is very sensitive to things like the original particle that seeded the growth, the temperature, the humidity, wind currents, etc, that change from moment to moment as the crystal grows. And tiny changes can get magnified as the crystal grows. This produces the stunning variety of snowflake details which gave rise to the saying.
Basically, the saying “no two snowflakes are alike” really means “if you look at a collection of snowflakes, you will be impressed by how different they all look from each other in a way that is not true for most other things”.
But this also really only holds for “classic” snowflakes. Sometimes snow comes down as a bunch of tiny hexagons or as long thin columns, which pretty much all look alike.
Same thing with lightning! How do we truly know this? 🤨
Good post
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