Two Snowflakes May Be Alike After All

An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting that it may be possible for two snowflakes to be alike after all. For anyone who studies probability, this seems reasonable, given that the article mentions that 10^24 snowflakes fall in any given year. The article contains links to fascinating snowflake pictures. From the article: 'A typical snow crystal weighs roughly one millionth of a gram. This means a cubic foot of snow can contain roughly one billion crystals ... "It is probably safe to say that the possible number of snow crystal shapes exceeds the estimated number of atoms in the known universe," Nelson said. Still, while "no two snowflakes are alike" might hold true for larger snowflakes, Nelson figures it might ring false for smaller crystals that sometimes fall before they have a chance to fully develop. "How likely is it that two snowflakes are alike? Very likely if we define alike to mean that we would have trouble distinguishing them under a microscope and if we include the crystals that hardly develop beyond the prism stage--that is, the smallest snow crystals," Nelson said.'"

Comments

My mom said you were wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am special. And I'm going to be famous.

So?

[camperdave]

Myth Busted?

A typical snow crystal weighs roughly one millionth of a grama cubic foot of snow can contain roughly one billion crystals...
Most snowflakes are less than one-half inch across. The smallest may be only about one-tenth of a millimeter across...

I think, if you're talking about the myth that Americans do science in metric, then yes: Myth Busted.

Re:okay, smarty-pants...

[NiteShaed]

Now how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

...you might just as well ask how many demons can dance on the head of a pin. They're of the same original stock, after all. And at least they dance. [Footnote: Although it's not what you and I would call dancing. Not good dancing anyway. A demon moves like a white band on "Soul Train."]

-- Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens

In other news...

[yali]

If someone tells you "You're one in a million," there are 6,571 people exactly like you.

next up...

[10100111001]

proving that a watched pot does indeed boil

Hoorah for science!

Re:Number of atoms in the universe

[C_L_Lk]

So how does the number of possible snowflake configurations compare with the number of possible IPV6 addresses? Can we assign a unique address to every snowflake and then just see if we get an address conflict somewhere?

Re:Birthday attack

[teknomage1]

So collisions in snowflake based hashing algorithms would be instances of a SnowCrash?

Re:Number of atoms in the universe

[MrNemesis]

The problem is that once you've done a ping sweep of the IPv6 network, the first lot of snowflakes have melted (along with the DHCP server).