Wilson Bentley Snowflake Research Papers

Up in the clouds on a cold Winters day, water vapor condenses into a water droplet and freezes into a tiny specs of dust. The water molecules morph together as a hexagonal pattern. As the water vapor condenses on the surface and the ice crystal grows larger and small branches bud off the hexagonal ice design. The ice crystal grows heavy enough it falls to the ground and is called and is then called a snowflake. This process happens over and over millions of times during a snowstorm. They are formed the same way, but can they all be the same shape and design? One historical figure who went wanted to find out this mystery is Wilson Bentley or so called “Snowflake Bentley.” Bentley became interested in snowflakes and attempted to draw them while looking into a microscope. Bentley attempted to draw each snowflake out on a piece of paper, but could never do because they melted instantly. “In 1885, at the age of nineteen, he photographed his first snowflake, against a background made as a dark as black velvet by long hours spent scraping the emulsion surrounding the snowflake images from the glass-plate negatives.” (Gopnik 2). Bentley was fascinated with the complexity and the uniqueness of each and every snowflake he

On the molecular side according to Hans Verlinde a professor of meteorology at Penn State says, “I would say with a great deal of confidence that all crystals are different on a molecular level, purely because there are differences in the atomic structure of the atoms making up a water molecule” (Verlinde 2). The fact that Knight found two identical snowflakes does not null Bentleys original hypothesis. All snowflakes are molecularly different no matter if they look identical. Knight and Bentley both only observed a handful of the billions of snowflakes created in the world. It is impossible for humans to know if every snowflake is different simply because there is no way to look at each