Artificial Snow
The young nuclear physicist Ukichiro Nakaya arrived at the University of Hokkaido in 1932. Hokkaido is the northernmost island of Japan, and as such the closest to the Okhotsk Sea. The Physics Department had meager research funds and equally scant facilities. The only thing they seemed to have in abundance on Hokkaido was ice. In fact today it is known as a skiing destination. Taking advantage of what was on hand, Nakaya began to research ice crystals. Snow forms in nature when a drop of water or steam freezes inside a cloud around a suspended particle (such as a bit of dust or pollen). When frozen, the drop of water becomes a crystal in the shape of a hexagonal prism. This transition process is called “reverse sublimation” and describes the direct conversion from the gaseous state of the steam to the solid state of the snow crystals. Snow can form in the atmosphere at or below 0°C when there is a minimum of humidity. It is never too cold for snow; it forms at extremely low temperatures. The six arms of a snow crystal reflect the internal order of water molecules. Which is why the six points of the hexagon appear in the process of crystallization. The way these branches grow depends on the atmospheric conditions (temperature, pressure, amount of water …), and that variation leads the flakes to take on semi-random shapes that are always different; there are no two identical snowflakes. They typically measure about a centimeter and a half, even though there are recorded cases of snowflakes as big as five centimeters in diameter. The first person who photographed these crystals was Wilson Bentley, a farmer in Vermont, in 1885. After many unsuccessful attempts, Bentley managed to attach a microscope to a camera in order to capture the phenomenon. He amassed a collection of 5,000 images, and is the father of photomicrography, the photography of objects invisible to the naked eye.
Ukichiro Nakaya in his laboratory, 1938.
Nakaya took three thousand photomicrographs of snow crystals, allowing him to establish a general classification of the shapes, which he subdivided into forty-one types.
One day in his lab, Ukichiro Nakaya found a snowflake on the tip of a rabbit hair on his jacket. As if in a strange variation on Alice’s search, it was a rabbit—albeit a dead one sewn onto a coat—that pointed the way toward the creation of artificial snow. Following its trail, the young scientist copied the temperature and humidity conditions in his laboratory at the moment the snowflake formed. On March 12, 1936, Nakaya created the first artificial snowflake, again on a rabbit hair. Up until that point, there had been numerous famous scientists and philosophers who had taken an interest in the phenomenon of snow crystals. The first ones were described by the Chinese in the second century BC. Subsequent attempts to address this problem in a more systematic way were carried out by the scientific philosophers of the seventeenth century in the West. Johannes Kepler began in 1611 with his treatise “On the Six-Cornered Snowflake,” followed by Descartes, and then Robert Hooke, who enjoyed the advantages of the latest technological advance—the microscope—and to whom we owe the first detailed drawings.
In The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination—whose title sums up my fascinations of the last two years—Eric G. Wilson speaks about the strange obsession of some thinkers with snowflakes: Emanuel Swedenborg, a hero of the Romantics who spoke with angels, began his career as a crystallographer. He had the theory that ice crystals reveal the inner laws of the universe. In 1721, before his attentions became captivated by heavens and hells, Swedenborg wrote The Principles of Chemistry. In this work he put forth a theory that was taken up by eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century scientists: the tiny geometries of snowflakes are portals to the essence of the cosmos. Thoreau concluded that the crystals, despite their cold geometry, are emanations of a vital principle, thus he perceived a comfortable regularity in the crystals’ delicate structure; the world as a geometric organ.
Nakaya described his first experiments with snow in this way:
I recall that, in our artificial snow experiments, there were some failures. We were therefore delighted to find similar mishaps in natural snow. In preparing papers for presentation we select only the photographs of well-formed crystals we have made, but in fact there were, and still are, a considerable number of failures. There are times when a crystal that starts on the right track will suddenly make an unexpected turn and assume a shape that defies any attempt at categorization. Such oddities that cannot be identified as crystals are considered failures, and we must start all over again.
However, if you look at natural snow with that perspective, you can find similar weird forms. After you discover one irregularity you notice others, one after another, at various stages of development, showing that natural snow is also capable of failure—to our great relief.
Once I came upon a most marvelous example of failed development in natural snow and cried out, “Come look, another mistake!” My assistant Mr. H. peered into the microscope and his face lit up with a blissful smile.5
5 Ukichiro Nakaya, an excerpt from Snow Postscripts. Translation by Keiko Murata.
The islands of Antarctica named after Nakaya.
Ukichiro Nakaya had three daughters: Fujiko, Sakiko, and Miyoko. Fujiko Nakaya, born in Sapporo, Hokkaido, in 1933, is an artist known for her sculptural fog installations, or environments, that she began making in the seventies. Going against her father’s geometric order, Fujiko enlisted the same medium, water vapor, to create spaces where geometry is erased and shapes lose their name.