Kenneth LibbrechtBesprekingen

I already have a Dover book on ice crystals (or I've given it away....I think that's the case) but it was really the work of W A Bentley of Vermont. And the current book is the work of a couple of snow scientists. I was a bit sad to see how they felt that they had to justify their work in the last couple of paragraphs. I feel that it stands on its own as a contribution to knowledge. Certainly the husband and wife team have pulled together some really interesting material about snow crystals and the science behind their formation plus they have produced some really lovely art works from their photos.
I've extracted a few segments from the book that caught my attention, as follows:
We name snowflakes for the same reason we name anything—so we can more easily talk about them. Certain snow crystals are common and distinctive looking, and those have fairly well-defined names. Stellar plates, stellar dendrites, fernlike stellar dendrites, hollow columns, and capped columns have all been part of the snowflake vocabulary for some time. Go significantly beyond that, however, and opinions differ. In an effort to be inclusive, perhaps, tables of snowflake types have become larger with time. In the 1940s the largest classification chart included 41 members. This number jumped to 80 in the 1960s, and recently a new table appeared with 121 different snowflake types. The chart the Libbrechts have produced on p27 shows their preferred snowflake classification. Because there can be no such thing as a final, definitive catalog, thy've pared the number down to make a chart that is convenient for snowflake watching. (It's a temperature cvs humidity chart and I recall seeing something similar in Scientific American many years ago.
Typically, cloud droplets must be chilled to somewhere between 21 degrees Fahrenheit (–6 ° C) and 5 degrees Fahrenheit (–15 ° C) before they turn into ice. Remove the dust, and droplets of very pure water can be supercooled to nearly–40 degrees Fahrenheit (–40 ° C) before they freeze. After it leaves the clouds, the snowflake no longer has a ready source of water vapour, so it stops growing. From then on the crystal drifts slowly downward with a typical velocity of around one mile per hour.
About one hundred thousand cloud droplets provide enough water vapour to make a single snowflake. It depends on how well things are mixed in the atmosphere, but there are probably, very roughly, about a thousand of your molecules captured in every snowflake picture.
The art of snowmaking is now so advanced that you can cover your lawn with white anytime and anywhere, even in summer. Compressed air doesn’t have the cooling power to make summertime snow, but liquid nitrogen freezes those droplets with aplomb.
The hands-down favourite snow inducer comes from the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae. This little beasty produces proteins that nucleate freezing at 28 degrees Fahrenheit (–2 ° C), Scientists were studying the bacterium to better understand and mitigate frost damage on crops. But instead, some clever person realized that this microbe’s talents could be harnessed for making artificial snow. The end result is better skiing at a lower price. You never know where science will take you.

Does it ever snow on other worlds? Possibly, but the snowflakes might look quite different from those found on Earth. On Mars, for example, water ice and carbon-dioxide ice (commonly known as dry ice) have both been spotted, and the latter can be several meters thick at the poles. It is still not known, however, if dry ice falls from the Martian atmosphere as “snowflakes” or forms directly on the surface like frost.

In 1611, Kepler presented a small treatise entitled The Six-Cornered Snowflake to his patron, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, as a New Year’s Day gift. He reasoned that each single plant has a single animating principle of its own, since each instance of a plant exists separately, and there is no cause to wonder that each should be equipped with its own peculiar shape. But to imagine an individual soul for each and any starlet of snow is utterly absurd, and therefore the shapes of snowflakes are by no means to be deduced from the operation of soul in the same way as with plants. Because it was known that cannonballs display a hexagonal pattern when stacked in a pile, Kepler conjectured that these two symmetries might be related. There was a germ of truth in this reasoning, because the geometry of stacking atoms lies at the heart of snow crystal symmetry. But the atomistic view of matter had not been developed by Kepler’s time. the word crystal really comes from quartz and Pliny described clear quartz as frozen ice. Pliny’s misunderstanding is still felt in the language of the present day. If you look in your dictionary, you may find that one of the first definitions for crystal is simply “quartz.” This is like saying the definition of food is “potato.” Funny how some quirks in the language remain after thousands of years.

In the crystal world, there are thirty-two possible ways to stack molecules, including five different cubic forms and seven different hexagonal ones. Some symmetries are forbidden—there are no crystal structures with five-fold symmetry, for example. This is true for the same reason you cannot tile your floor with pentagonal tiles; pentagons simply do not fit together without leaving gaps. In the European Union, “lead crystal” must be composed of at least 24 percent lead oxide, while “crystal glass” must include similar amounts of other metal oxides.

Smooth surfaces are difficult to hold onto, while the rough spots have lots of dangling molecular bonds to grab. As a result, the rough spots accumulate molecules quickly, while the smooth surfaces do so more slowly. Before long, the rough areas add water molecules and fill in, leaving only the smooth areas to define the shape of the crystal. These smooth, slower-moving surfaces become the crystal facets. Faceting is an important player in the genesis of snow crystal structure. Faceting explains the formation of simple hexagonal prisms, defining the snow crystal’s six-fold symmetry. But most snowflakes are much more elaborate than simple prisms, so faceting is only part of the story. The six corners of a snow crystal grow a bit faster because they stick out farther into the humid air, causing branches to sprout. As the crystal grows larger, the same effect causes sidebranches to sprout from the faceted corners of each branch. This process is responsible for the complex shapes of snow crystals. The corners experience runaway growth as this cycle accelerates—the corners stick out a bit, so they grow a bit faster; soon they stick out even more, so they grow faster still. Thus branches sprout from the six corners of a hexagonal prism. This process of runaway growth is called the branching instability, and it is responsible for much of the elaborate structure you see in snowflakes. The six branches all grow independently of one another, but they grow alike because each experiences the same external fluctuations in temperature and humidity. The detailed morphology of each falling crystal is determined by the path it takes through the clouds and by the temperature and humidity it experiences along the way. A complex path yields a complex snowflake. Because no two crystals follow precisely the same path through the turbulent atmosphere, no two snowflakes will be exactly alike. When the ice growth is especially hurried, sidebranches appear rather chaotically as the crystal develops. Chaos and order are both present during snow-flake growth, and this is what makes snowflake patterns so intriguing. By itself, the branching instability brings chaos—the unbridled creation of structural complexity, as exemplified by the random sidebranching in a fernlike stellar dendrite. Faceting, on the other hand, brings order, as embodied by the simple perfection of the hexagonal prism. Bring these two forces together, however, and beautifully intricate, symmetrical snowflakes result.

In terms of mathematically modelling the development of snow crystals, the breakthrough came in 2005 when mathematician Clifford Reiter established that cellular automata models of diffusion-limited growth could produce structures that were both faceted and branched, reproducing many features seen in snowflakes. Subsequent work has demonstrated stellar dendrites, capped columns, hollow columns, double plates, and other snowflake types. The construction of each snowflake reflects a quiet clash between order and chaos that plays out within the winter clouds. We still cannot explain why snow crystals grow into broad stellar dendrites at some temperatures while growing into slender ice columns and needles at other temperatures. Figuring out the interaction of two water molecules is doable, but even state-of-the-art computers cannot handle many molecules at once with sufficient accuracy.

We have no walk-in cold room in our lab; with our chest freezer and all our other snow chambers, we keep the cold boxed up so we can work in room-temperature comfort. Basically our photomicroscope is a set of three microscope objectives covering a range of magni-fications attached to a digital camera using a long extension tube. The objectives are mounted on a custom-built turret, making it easy to change magnifications for different snowflakes. Our specimens are almost always on glass slides, and these rest on a translation stage that moves up and down to focus, as is typical with microscopes Another neat trick for producing laboratory snowflakes is to grow them on the ends of electrically induced ice needles. The basic idea is to use strong electric fields to modify the ice growth behavior, a technique that was discovered in 1963 by Basil Mason and his collaborators at Imperial College London. Ken and his colleagues made some advances in this method

With more than seven billion people on the planet, surely a few of us can be spared to look into these matters. Also, you can rest assured that none of your tax dollars have gone into our snowflake projects.
Well, I liked the book. And I liked their overwhelming honesty about what they knew and what they didn't know. It was refreshing and overall, I found I was quite fascinated with what they were doing. Five stars from me.

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An enjoyable look at how snowflakes form and what forms snowflakes can take with a lot of photographs showing the large variety of snowflakes that can exist.

Excellent book including directions on how to make photographs like those in the book. Highly recommended!

The beauty of snowflakes brought to life by the genius of Kenneth Libbrecht.

"Out of the bosom of the air
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken.
Over the woodlands brown and bare.
Over the harvest-fields forsaken.
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1897-1882)

"Joy in looking and comprehending natures's most beautiful gift."-Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

I got this off the outlet on Amazon for less than it would cost to drive to a store to buy it ;) I love the pictures and I have always had a deep facination with snow. Fairly informative. I want to find another really cheap copy and tear out the pictures and frame them :)

This book has dense with full-colour photographs of various types of snowflakes and water-crystals. The book is also informative and well-written, explaining how snowflakes form and what variables effect their appearance. A lovely introduction to snowflakes.

The photographs are the star of this book: the author photographs them with a microscope and shines colored lights through the ice from behind to make them appear colorful rather than clear.

Information-wise, this is better for elementary school than preschool. There is plenty of information about snowflakes (including instructions for how to make a paper snowflake).

*

Re-read February 2021

This is a great seasonal coffee table book. The Art of the Snowflake explains the science behind them, but the hook is the photography. There are hundreds of photos of different types of snowflakes in all their crystalline detail.

To see this review as well as this week's favorite children's books please visit www.readrantrockandroll.com

The Secret Life of a Snowflake has to be one of the most beautiful children's science books I've seen. The author, Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, is a professor of physics and studies crystals. Not only does the book contain many photographs of Dr. Libbrecht's snowflake finding's, it also teaches facts about them. Many of these facts I never knew as an adult which makes this a book for everyone. Some of them include:

-Why is snow the color white?
-How are snowflakes made?
-Why are they all so different?
-Why do snowflakes all have 6 branches?

The author even covers the different states of water, clouds, the birth of a snowflake, and provides a pattern for cutting your own paper snowflake.

This is a wonderful book that would be perfect for applying in a science curriculum for kids. If you simply can't wait to read this book, you can visit his website at www.snowcrystals.com. Here you will find countless photos of close-up snowflakes. Simply Amazing.

5*****

Fascinating and packs a lot of info into its mere 144 (heavily illustrated) pages, thus proving that concise and plain language is a far better and efficient use of one's text space than showing off with unnecessary syllables and flowery phrases. An excellent beginner's introduction to exactly how snow crystals form and then become snowflakes or one of a myriad of other forms of particles that make up snow. Also includes instructions for capturing and "fossilizing" snowflakes to prevent them melting (hint: involves glass slides and superglue) and photography tips, plus how to make synthetic snowflakes in a chest freezer.

And the photographs! Incredible, beautiful photographs! Even if you don't read a word of this book, it's worth having just for the photographs.

Authors have created Snow Crystals.com which also contains a lot of info and gorgeous photos (some from the book). You'll never be able to look at snow the same way again.

Amazing and beautiful photographs of individual snowflakes.

The beautiful close-ups of snowflakes will captivate any student. It is a great book to interest children in science. Because of some difficult words, it might not be the best book to give to younger elementary students. However, it would be a great book for fourth or fifth graders. This book will teach them a lot of interesting facts about snowflakes as well give them a chance to see snowflakes like they've never seen them before.

Pieni kirja täynnä kauniita, yksityiskohtaisia valokuvia lumihiutaleista. Kuvateksteistä löytyy hieman tietoa lumihiutaleiden synnystä ja lisäksi kirjassa on aiheeseen sopivia sitaatteja tunnetuilta henkilöiltä kuten Jane Austen ja Albert Einstein.

What do snowflakes have to do with the Cal Tech Physics Department? A lot, come to find out! Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht uses snowflakes to study how crystals grow, and how temperature affects the direction and depth of crystal growth. Everyone's heard that no two snowflakes are alike, but because Libbrecht has documented the many different ways snowflakes develop and form, he's also managed to do the math to tell how many different kind of snowflakes there can be, and it's a bigger number than the number of atoms in the universe. (Get OUT! Really??) Why is snow white? Why do we sometimes get giant clumpy flakes, and sometimes tiny powdery flakes? How come snowflakes never have 5 or 7 "arms"? This illustrated guide makes understanding the science of snow easy, and the photos are incredible! Dr. Libbrecht takes his own photos of snowflakes, using a microscope, so you get o see all of the magical hexagonal details. He's also written other books on snow, and keeps a CalTech webpage about snow. Aimed for grades 4-6, this is a delightful, fun read for winter.

"Summary: Beautiful pictures illustrate Kenneth Libbrechts story of the microphotography of snow crystals from the pioneering work of Wilson Bentley in the 1890s right up to Libbrechts own innovations in the age of digital images. This edition is a breathtaking look at works of art that melt in an instant. MBI"
Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht's snowflake microphotography captures real snowflakes in full color and incredible detail. See also by Libbrecht: The Snowflake: Winter's Secret Beauty, and The Little Book of Snowflakes.
He also has a great website, www.snowcrystals.com

As kids we were all told snowflakes were six-sided crystals and no two were alike. Most of us even made paper cutouts or drew snowflakes for winter school projects. But how often have we had the chance to actually see six points on a real snowflake? I lucked out just last month as they fell on my black wool coat. They were tiny, but clearly in their six-sided glory.

Kenneth Libbrecht has certainly seen his share of snowflakes. The California physics professor uses what he calls a traveling snowflake photomicroscope to capture images of the crystals fresh from the sky. He’s published a trio of books with amazing full-color closeup photographs. I used to think some of my classmates snowflake cutouts had a bit too much embellishment, but even they were not as complex as most of these beauties plucked from nature.

The Art of the Snowflake, published in large format, lets you see the snowflakes with a clarity you have probably never seen before. Many of the same photos are packed into a smaller package called The Little Book of Snowflakes. Both volumes are almost exclusively photographs with minimal descriptive text. The Snowflake: Winter’s Secret Beauty has much more text, and gives the reader a better idea how these amazing snow crystals come about.

By the way: The covers show what look like detailed drawings. Nope. Just some of Libbrecht’s remarkable photos.

Find more of my reviews at Mostly NF.

Students are amazed at the individuality of the snowflake. Each one unique. A related book is Snowflake Bentley, the story of a young boy who photographed snowflakes.

Close up, stunning photos of snowflakes by CalTech's head of physics, combined with quotes about nature, wonder and science. Snowflake lite gift version of the more in depth Snowflakes by Libbrecht.

Magical photographs of snowflakes taken by the head of CalTech's physics department are a revelation. Lots of detail about snowflake formation and the techniques used to take the photos. Stunning, amazing, awesome - physics nerd crossover appeal for all ages.

Unsurpassed eye candy

Great overview of the the science of snowflakes. Catalogs snowflakes by shape and type, and talks about conditions under which the different types are formed.
What distinguishes this book, however, are the wonderful photographs of snowflakes. Like nothing you have ever seen.

6310