When a Pulitzer Prize writer meets a quantum field theorist on a snowy day, the heavens sparkle with possibility.
Snowflakes that look like doilies on a tea tray. Snowflakes that shimmer like stars in a distant galaxy. Snowflakes that have the look of bony, calcified starfish left behind by a receding tide. Snowflakes that seem to have the pitch-filled blisters of a fir-tree branch. Snowflakes, snowflakes, everywhere.
Snowflakes, in this case, caught as they sparkle, just before their incontrovertible, irreversible, and inevitable descent into a formless puddle. Snowflakes transferred onto a microscope by a very fine brush, the kind you might use for a watercolor painting — for what we are describing here is the creation of a work of art. Snowflakes eventually captured by a bespoke camera. Snowflakes whose images were shot at Fairbanks, in Alaska, and Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, two places where snowflakes are plentiful, but displayed and offered for sales in New Orleans and La Jolla, where they are not.
The visionary — the man whose vision sees beauty in the feature of nature that produces blizzards, snarls automobile traffic in cities, cancels school and, not so incidentally, creates the surface for our esteemed winter sport — is Nathan Myhrvold, a polymath who has not been on a pair of skis for a third of a century.
Rather, Myhrvold has been the chief technology officer at Microsoft, cofounder of a software company, did pathfinding research with Stephen Hawking on quantum theories of gravitation, advised nine startup companies, was a pioneer in computational epidemiology, created a culinary-research laboratory, published a 2,438-page cookbook — and then decided that what he really wanted to do, where his true, untapped passion lay — was taking photographs of snowflakes.
Not cell phone snaps. Not casual shots while the flakes melted into watery blots. Not pictures of snowbanks that displayed a hazy shade of winter or were souvenirs from a walk on a winter’s day. But stunning, beautiful, granular closeups of snowflakes produced with a custom camera he spent 18 months designing himself and has the capacity — the power — of transforming nature into art.
Many of Myhrvold’s other pursuits weren’t incongruous for a man who entered college at age 14, studied math, economics and geophysics at UCLA and Princeton, and earned a Ph. D. with a dissertation on “vistas in curved space-time quantum field theory”. But snowflakes? He hasn’t been on a pair of skis since Good Will Hunting was on theater marquees and Celine Dion first sang My Heart Will Go On. He doesn’t do winter camping. He doesn’t have to scrape the ice from the windshield of his automobile; he lives in Bellevue Washington, for gosh sakes. But he has discovered that there is something special — something romantic, something poetic, even — about a snowflake: something that the English poet William Blake might have celebrated, had he lived at Lake Louise rather than in London, by speaking of “To See a World in a Flake of Snow”.
“Snow is art, but there is no artist,” Myhrvold told me. “A billion brilliant pieces of art can be easily produced within an hour and no one will see and really appreciate them, because you need to see them at high magnification.”
Kenneth Libbrecht, a physicist at CalTech who is the Ansel Adams, or perhaps the Yousuf Karsh, of the snowflake world, has estimated that 315 billion trillion snowflakes fall annually, enough for creating seven billion snowmen every 10 minutes, every day of the year. He and Myhrvold met a decade and a half ago. It probably was the right contact for Myhrvold, for the subtitles to Libbrecht’s books have a lyricism to them: One is Winter’s Frozen Art. Another is Winter’s Secret Beauty. A third is Winter’s Frozen Artistry.
“Snowflakes are remarkable examples of nature’s art,” Libbrecht writes in the opening of The Art of the Snowflake, a coffee-table book that occupies an unusual niche: a salute to an outdoor phenomenon that is meant to be read inside, a celebration of the cold meant to be appreciated by the warmth of the hearth.
“They are born within the gray winter clouds, where the simple act of freezing turns formless water into spectacular crystalline ice sculptures,” he writes. “How amazing it is that these elaborate, symmetrical, and sometimes something stunningly beautiful appears quite literally out of thin air.”
How amazing, indeed. Very cool, in both senses of the word.
A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere.—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Snowshoers tramp on it, toddlers play in it, trucks plow it, people courting heart attacks shovel it. Dogs revel in it, poets celebrate it, Dartmouth Winter Carnival sculptors shape it, children add a corncob pipe and a button nose (and two eyes made out of coal) to it. And this, too: philosophers ponder it, and scientists study it.
In his 2019 Snow: A Scientific and Cultural Exploration, Giles Whittell reminds us of the similarities between snow and religion. “It comes from heaven,” he writes. “It changes everything. It creates an alternative reality and brings on irrational behavior in humans. There is a difference, though. Unlike religion, snow asks searching questions about the mysteries of nature.”
Those questions have been around for centuries. More than 400 years ago, Johannes Kepler, otherwise known for his theories of laws of planetary motion — there! finally an unanticipated straight line from Myhrvold’s Master’s degree in space physics! — expressed astonishment at the signature geometric characteristic of snow, writing, “There must be some reason why, whenever snow begins to fall, its initial formations invariably display the shape of a six-cornered starlet.”
There they go again, as Ronald Reagan might say: an expression of wonder when it comes to snow, in this case the employment of the word starlet. The answer is more prosaic. The 108-degree angles formed by the merger of two hydrogen atoms and a single oxygen atom — think H2O — doesn’t change when that molecule is frozen. But, Whittell explains, the process of freezing forces water molecules into “a three-dimensional hexagonal lattice as they lose energy and surrender to the cold.” We’ll stop there. A glossy magazine of fun and fashion is not the place to share more science — how many water molecules needed to form a stable frozen lattice, for example (answer: 275) — and, besides, that might rob the snowflake of its artistic properties in a brutal surrender to its scientific ones.
The only other sound’s the sweep, of easy wind and downy flake.—Robert Frost
Myhrvold isn’t the first to photograph snowflakes. That may have been Wilson A. Bentley (1865-1931), a Vermont farmer known, inevitably and poetically, as Snowflake Bentley whose more than 5,000 photographs of snowflakes were studied around the globe and published in such publications as Scientific American and National Geographic. “From the beginning,” said Bentley, believed to be first person to assert that no two snowflakes were alike, “it was the snowflakes that fascinated me most.”
Then there was Libbrecht. Much of his work has been done in the laboratory, where he creates ice crystals. His photographs are stunning, full of pastels and countless shades of blue, all enhanced by colored lighting that, he explains, exploits the refractive property of the ice crystals. On occasion he digitally stitches together several photographs, sometimes adjusting brightness and contrast for effect. “Nature,” he writes, “provides so much to see and ponder, even in the cold winds of winter.”
And now, Myhrvold. He had, of course, seen photographs of snow before, but they mostly were of snowbanks. No great inspiration there. But gradually he was struck by the beauty of individual snowflakes. “At some point in life, most people who experience winter,” he and Charles Krebs, an award-winning photographer, wrote in the scholarly journal Microscopy Today, “develop a fascination with snow and admire the intricate, seemingly innumerable patterns of snowflakes.”
Myhrvold had a serious case of Snowflake Fever. He, Krebs, and electrical-optical systems specialist 3ric [cq] Johanson fashioned a portable microscopy system designed to take images of snowflakes in the field. This allows Myhrvold to undertake snowflake photography in a manner that allowed them to avoid the challenges that stymied Bentley, who in 1922 explained that “the utmost haste must be used, for a snow crystal is often exceedingly tiny, and frequently not thicker than heavy.”
The key was to find a way that evaded the swift evaporation that frustrated Bentley’s early efforts in Vermont.
Myhrvold’s technique involves catching snowflakes with a piece of black cardboard that he holds as snow is falling. He then transfers the snowflakes onto the microscope, fitted with a cooling system that he developed. The sable-hair brush he employs in this process gives the snowflake a static charge, allowing him to transfer it to a microscope slide. He’ll take from 10 to 100 photographs of a single snowflake, put them together in a software program, and make high-resolution prints.
In the gallery, as in these pages, are images that carry names such as Ice Queen, No Two Alike, Yellowknife Flurry, and Indigo Gradient. They remind us that there is enchantment in the ordinary, charm in the commonplace, allure in the unremarkable, magic in the mundane, and art in the familiar.
“Snowflakes are incredibly beautiful,” he says. “They’re an example of where a natural phenomenon creates beautiful patterns not only in one place — and maybe a billion at a time.”
