How do they know that no snow flake is the same?

Answer 1

The mass of a typical snowflake is about 6.6 x 10^-6 lbs, or roughly 150,000 snowflakes per pound of water. An inch of rain per square foot of ground it falls on weighs about 5.5 pounds, but an inch of rain is about 12 inches of snowfall. So, 1 inch of snowfall per hour makes roughly 70K snowflakes per square foot per hour, or roughly 2 x 10^9 snowflakes per hour per square mile. Roughly 10% of the world's surface recieves about 100 inches of snowfall a year. Since there's 200 x 10^6 square miles of world's surface, that comes to the order of 10^19 snowflakes in a year worldwide. A snowflake typically has 6-sided symmetry, and roughly 1/2" in diameter, so we may dissect it into 12 regions, each of roughly 1/64 square inch, which is the same area as a single square 1/8" to a side. Now, 2^64 is crudely the same as 10^19, so if we imagine the 1/8" square to be divided into 64 smaller boxes, each one measuring only 1/64" to the side, we can consider all possible permutations of these 64 boxes as having ice in it or not. Since that's easily discernable under the microscrope, it's not unreasonable at all to be able to distinguish between all the snowflakes falling on the world in an entire year! However, the odds do favor two random permutations being alike, and that it does favor the creation of two snowflakes somewhere in the world in a year being indistinguishable under the microscope.

Answer 2

OK, there is the long explanation and there is the short. You saw the long a** one, now to say it in simpler terms...

The probability that a cloud will create the same dandrites (a type of snow flake) is very low, not to mention when they begin to fall down to the ground they crash into water droplets, which can freeze and make a different design, or collided into other types of snow flakes to combine into a new one or be shattered. Hence they could be created the same way (which is rare) but as they fall they will no longer look the same.

So the probability of that happening is the same as finding a 7 leaf clover, somewhere that is not polluted with radiative material.

Answer 3

well, of course they cannot be certain that there isn't a pair of snowflakes that are identical, because scientists have not analyzed every single snowflake in the world, but the way snowflakes are formed in air and the way water crystalizes, the chances that two snowflakes are exactly the same are quite low.

Answer 4

I read in the newspaper science section about a week ago that snowflakes can be duplicated many times during a snowstorm.
Barney Darche

Answer 5

i became into continually informed informed that no person snow flake is like yet another, only like us, we are all diverse, possibly that's the place the saying comes from, 'we are all somewhat flaky' sorry l ought to no longer stand up to :)

Answer 6

it has something to do w/ the crystals in the snowflake.

Answer 7

because they have different shapes and size