The snowflake fascinates with its delicate beauty basalt columns, such as the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland (pictured at the top of the screen) inspire awe. Small, young snowflakes, are perfect hexagons, but, soon, the more electrically charged points attract water molecules to produce the Fabergé ornamentations that give them their full beauty. They have the same symmetry as a hexagon, but a flurry of snow doesn’t deposit thousands of hexagons on your lawn. Single snowflakes are mostly symmetrical and always have six corners. I’m hugely simplifying here, but trust me, it’s for the best. They can also join face-on, perfectly aligned, thus forming a crystal. Leftover charges enable the hexagons to join to other hexagons edge-on. Water molecules have positive and negative charges arranged at just the right angle for six of them to form a hexagon. Indeed, there are more than a dozen arrangements of water molecules that form different ices (including, for readers of Kurt Vonnegut Jr, the apocalyptic Ice Nine), yet the hexagon dominates. Nevertheless, they are all, at heart, hexagonal. Famously, no two are ever the same, a piece of apparent hyperbole that is quite true. No other crystal has such flair, such imagination. This form of silicon dioxide takes its shape very seriously – not only is it hexagonal in cross-section, the ends form into six-sided pyramids. The most well-known crystalline substance is quartz. Crystals come in many shapes, reflecting those of their constituent atoms or molecules and how they join hands.Ĭrystals are molecules writ large. We may be just a little surprised to see so many hexagons in living things, but, in inorganic structures, they are more to be expected.
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