Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Regularity and randomness


I was reading something this evening about snowflake formation/how bacteria grow in culture/fractals. What all these processes have in common is they are based on a regular pattern/model of growth, and that the actual details of the growth outcome are unpredictable. So they are structured, but not determinable.

I then came across some stunning images of snowflakes.



This site has some lovely links.



Nature's amazing. Why do I keep forgetting that?

1 comment:

Andy said...

They are pretty amazing, arene't they? I imagine they get the pictures using some kind of special super-high-resolution photomicroscopy apparatus (he quoted, shamelessly).

They talk through the techniques here.