Snow flakes

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Dinesh ^club

Sensitive dependence on initial conditions serves not to destroy but to create. As a growing snowflake falls to earth, typically floating in the wind for an hour or more, the choices made by the branching tips at any instant depend sensitively on such things as the temperature, the humidity, and the presence of impurities in the atmospheres. The six tips of a single snowflake, spreading within a millimeter space, feel the same temperatures, and because the laws of growth are purely deterministic, they maintain a near-perfect symmetry. But the nature of the turbulent air is such that any pair of snowflakes will experience very different paths. The final flake records the history of all the changing weather conditions it had experienced, and the combinations may as well be infinite.

Snowflakes are non equilibrium phenomena, physicists like to say. They are products of imbalance in the flow of energy from one piece of nature to another. The flow turns a boundary into a tip, the tip into an array of branches, the array into a complex structure never before seen. As scientists have discovered such instability obeying the universal laws of chaos, they have succeeded in applying the same method of a host of physical and chemical problems, and, inevitably they suspect that biology is next. . . . . . Page 313/314

7 weeks ago. Edited 7 weeks ago.

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