The Science of Snowflakes
The entire realm of objective human knowledge now fits within a framework of laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. That’s not to say that everything in the world has been discovered, but that is to say that all the millions of objective observations that have been made interact with each other in consistent patterns.
If you think you can discover some objective evidence about the world that will fall outside the consistent patterns scientists have discovered, you’re more than welcome to try. But first you’ll need to build a more powerful telescope, or microscope, or computer than anyone has ever built before, because all the things that have been studied with the telescopes, microscopes, and computers we have now, fall into consistent patterns.
Take snowflakes for example. Science can’t prove directly that all snowflakes are unique, but religion can’t do that either. To prove that all snowflakes were unique by direct observation would require someone to take a photograph of every single snowflake that has ever fallen in the history of the world, and obviously that hasn’t been done. But by studying a lot of snowflakes you can figure out how snowflakes form and why they form the way they do. And from that, you can prove why it isn’t possible for two identical snowflakes to form.
Specifically, water molecules freeze in different patterns according to the temperatures at which they freeze. The temperature, pressure, and air currents in the atmosphere vary from place to place and change from time to time. The slight variation in temperatures between two points an inch apart, or at the same point from one second to the next, can be enough to make water molecules freeze in different patterns. Each snowflake forms while it’s falling through those ever-changing temperatures, and each snowflake gets moved around through different temperatures by the changing air pressures and currents. Now we can say that all snowflakes are unique because by studying some snowflakes and how they formed, we’ve discovered that no two snowflakes can ever form in identical atmospheric conditions.
Science is that, applied to everything in the known universe. This is why I can say that there’s nothing left we can learn about the world that will fundamentally change our understanding of it. By discovering how patterns like this created all the things we know a lot about, we can see from the little we know about everything else that the same patterns created them, just in ways we haven’t figured out yet. The parts of the world we don’t understand yet are small parts of large patterns. The little we do know about everything are the most critical things—like, that everything in the world is made up of atoms, which interact with each other according to well established laws of chemistry, and that all of life is governed by evolution. The only thing left to figure out is specifically how those big patterns affect everything on Earth.