Stephen Wolfram

And it talked about, you know, what's the rate of snowflake growth?

And, you know, it got pretty good answers for the rate of the growth of the snowflake.

And I looked at it more carefully.

And they had these nice curves of, you know, snowflake growth rates and so on.

I looked at it more carefully.

And I realized, according to their models, the snowflake will be spherical.

And so they got the growth rate right, but the detail was just utterly wrong.

And not only the detail, the whole thing was not capturing, it was capturing this aspect of the system that was in a sense missing the main point of what was going on.

Snowflakes start in the phase of water that's relevant to the formation of snowflakes.

It's a phase of ice which starts with a hexagonal arrangement of water molecules.

And so it starts off growing as a hexagonal plate.

And then what happens is... It's a plate, oh, oh, versus sphere.

Well, no, no, but it's much more than that.

I mean, snowflakes are fluffy.

You know, typical snowflakes have little dendritic arms.

And what actually happens is, it's kind of cool because you can make these very simple discrete models with cellular automata and things that figure this out.

You start off with this hexagonal thing, and then the place is, it starts to grow little arms.

And every time a little piece of ice

it adds itself to the snowflake.

The fact that that ice condensed from the water vapor heats the snowflake up locally.