René Descartes on snowflakes

Supplemental material for the Quick Study "Snow and ice crystals" PHYSICS TODAY, December 2007, page 70.

Yoshinori Furukawa and John S. Wettlaufer

During the winter of 1635, René Descartes made the strikingly detailed illustrations of snow crystals shown below. His observations, published in the 1637 Discours de la méthode touch on many of the perplexing issues at the heart of contemporary studies of snow crystals. Here are some of those observations, translated from the French by Charles Frank in the Journal of Glaciology, volume 13, page 535, 1974:

But what astonished me the most was that among the grains that fell last night I noticed some which had around them six little teeth, like clock makers' wheels . . . but so perfectly formed in hexagons, and of which the six sides were so straight, and the six arms so equal, that it is impossible for man to make anything so exact.

I only had difficulty to imagine what could have formed and made so exactly symmetrical these six teeth around each grain in the midst of free air and during the agitation of a very strong wind, until I finally considered that this wind had easily been able to carry some of these grains to the bottom or to the top of some cloud, and hold them there, because they were rather small; and that there they were obliged to arrange themselves in such a way that each was surrounded by six others in the same plane, following the ordinary order of nature.

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René Descartes on snowflakes

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