Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

[Draggingtree]

American Greatness

Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

By Ashley Hamilton| February 22, 2018

Stop calling “snowflakes” snowflakes. Stop misrepresenting the greatness of the latter with the god-awfulness of the former, whose ranks include students and citizens too precious to offend and too prone to taking offense at almost everything. One is the result of a natural sequence of events, the consequence of which is a heavy yet silent downpour of beauty. The other is a storm of protest—an avalanche of anarchy—against criticism, independence, judgment, common sense, and conviction.

 To conflate the two is to debase human nature by degrading the subjects of Mother Nature, including geometry, physics, chemistry, light, and life itself; because the complexity of an actual snowflake—which is a hexagon of happenstance, as remarkable as it is random—is a revelation of structure and a symbol of otherworldly significance in its own right. It comes to life by reflecting light, appearing (in full) through the lights of science; the same lights that scientists use to uncover the double helix within every living creature. It is also the life’s work of every chemist who teaches crystallography, which is the study of how atoms form solids.