Mister MaGoogle

Lately when I hear a common cliche or a trivia question, I've said, "I'm going to Google that." Inquiring minds want to know, or at least mine does.

Today it is snowing in Vegas . . . the third year in a row we have had a beautiful dose of four seasons. Who says you can't have the best of both worlds?

Out my front door. How about your view?

As I was driving home from the gym with snowflakes falling on my windshield, the thought struck me . . . Are there really no two snowflakes alike? Who knows that for sure? Is my money being spent on that kind of research? So, I Googled it. (and it is book related.)

I got lost when the words quantum physics, electrons, and isotopes showed up. So, I skipped and skimmed to the bottom line: Nano-snowflakes can be exactly alike. Small snow crystals can look alike. Larger, complex snowflakes are all different.

To illustrate, here is a bookish comparison:

The number of possible ways of making a complex snowflake is staggeringly large. To see just how much so, consider a simpler question -- how many ways can you arrange 15 books on your bookshelf? Well, there's 15 choices for the first book, 14 for the second, 13 for the third, etc. Multiply it out and there are over a trillion ways to arrange just 15 books. With a hundred books, the number of possible arrangements goes up to just under 10158 (that's a 1 followed by 158 zeros). That number is about 1070 times larger than the total number of atoms in the entire universe!

Now when you look at a complex snow crystal, you can often pick out a hundred separate features if you look closely. Since all those features could have grown differently, or ended up in slightly different places, the math is similar to that with the books. Thus the number of ways to make a complex snow crystal is absolutely huge.
And thus it's unlikely that any two complex snow crystals, out of all those made over the entire history of the planet, have ever looked completely alike.

There you have it folks. For the original Mr. Google, read HERE.