CulturalCreative
CulturalCreative
On Snowflakes And Nobel Prizes
Oct 7th, 2008
Over at Treehugger, we write about the Nobel Prize for (beautiful) symmetry breaking that Yoichiro Nambu, US, share with Makoto Kobayashi & Toshihide Masukawa from Japan. Reuters explain how they did “work that helped explain why the universe is made up mostly of matter and not anti-matter via processes known as broken symmetries.” And that helps explain why snowflakes look like they do!
James Trefil explains the snowflake like this:
Both the hydrogen and oxygen molecules are quite symmetric when they are isolated. The electric force which governs their actions as atoms is also a symmetrically acting force. But when their temperature is lowered and they form a water molecule, the symmetry of the individual atoms is broken as they form a molecule with 105 degrees between the hydrogen-oxygen bonds. When they freeze to form a snowflake, they form another type of symmetry, but the symmetry of the original atoms has been lost. Since this loss of symmetry occurs without any external intervention, we say that it has undergone spontaneous symmetry breaking.
- SERVICEs
-
- URL
- KEYWORDs
Related
-
GreenBusiness
![[30aHEADS]](http://greenz.jp/en/wp-content/themes/greenz_v2-1/banner/gfBanner_30aheads.gif)
