The Snowflake Myth

now i'm gonna turn on 2000 volts and this is the first step in creating snowflakes in the lab this is totally wild crazy huh the tips of those needles are like 100 nanometers in diameter that is so wild dr ken liebrecht is the snowflake guy i was the snowflake consultant for the movie frozen it's okay to conjure snowflakes out of your fingertips but they have to be real snowflakes or people aren't buying it the u.s post office made snowflake stamps using my pictures it's not the kind of thing you normally think of when you start doing physics that you'd be in a postage stamp you've written the book on snowflakes literally so i had like two successful books in a row so we just kept making books until finally they sold zero copy and then we stopped sir you're kind of like a snowflake artist i call it designer snowflake [Music] because yes i am designing this on the fly i don't have a computer that does all this for me i just do it by hand so everyone's a little different ken knows so much about snowflakes he can design and construct them to his own specifications so what's happening now is just growing and doing its thing at some it's at minus 13 celsius now but i want to make some branches i'll just turn this down to minus 15. then i'm going to increase the humidity a little bit the supersaturation and you'll start to see branches come out there see you changing those conditions just caused the plate to kind of stop and become really i changed the growth conditions to prefer branches this little thing right there that little nub that's the only thing that touches the sapphire substrate the rest of this is all growing above this increases the air flow those are droplets forming and now i'm really kicking it in gear now what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn that humidity down to zero so the droplets are starting to recede and this will stop growing and kind of start to fasten a little bit say i want branches again now i'm going to really hammer on it so you're giving it a lot of moisture a lot of moisture now but you'll see side branches you really start to feel you understand what's ...