Listener Questions #16

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2:25Snowflakes are hexagons and each one is unique. Their amazing symmetry just adds to their mystique. I've heard flamingos are pink because of their diet. What if I ate a flamingo? Would I turn pink if I tried it? Iodine injections protect from radiation. I saw it on TV, but I don't understand the mechanism. How exactly can that be? Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it right. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

3:10Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and space, and I am so excited about our flamingo question today. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I've never eaten a flamingo. I haven't either. As we'll see later in the show, we probably ought not to. But so my question for you today, Daniel, so we are recording the day before Google calendars tells me that it's your birthday. How does Google know that? I'm actually not sure. I must have put it in at some point in the past because, you know, I've been co-hosting with you for a while now. But so how do you celebrate birthdays?

3:47So, yeah, I'm turning 50 tomorrow, which is kind of a big milestone, but I actually don't really celebrate my birthday. I don't feel like it's that special a day. I'm not really that into birthdays and sort of like being on the spot that way. I sort of prefer to fade into the background. And so to counteract that, I've actually been rounding up my age to 50 for a few years now. Are you serious? Which Katrina is not very excited about, yeah. Especially because when she turned 46, I welcomed her into the Round Up to 50 club. And she was like, no, thank you. You can stay there alone, Daniel. Exactly.

4:20Wow I'll have to remember that strategy I also am a fade into the background Birthday person But I hadn't thought about the rounding up Strategy and I think I'm So I always forget how old I am but I'm 43 Is that right? No my birthday is in October and it's 2020 I'll be 43 in October so I'm 42 So it's not quite time for me to round up Yet but I will I'll get there soon Well Katrina tells me it's ridiculous to round up But I say, hey, look, it's arbitrary to round up to the year. People aren't super precise about how old they are. When you ask them, they don't say, I'm 42 years and seven months and three days.

4:58They round up to the year, right? So I think, hey, I just round up to the decade. You know, what's the big deal? Sure. Yeah. No, physicists are always, you know, making broad assumptions about things and rounding. And so you might as well. Yeah. Pi is three and Daniel is 50. What's the big deal? That's right. There you go. Well, I hope you have an amazing decade. Thank you. Arbitrary, though, that milestone may be to you. All right. Well, we're not here to talk about Daniel's birthday. We're here to answer your questions about the nature of the universe. How does it all work? How does it fit together?

5:28How can we make it click together in your mind? And so as usual, we invite people to send us their questions. Write to us to questions at danielandkelly.org. We write back to everybody with a response. We either give you the answer or make a joke or say, we don't know, here's something to read. That's right. Lately, often I've been giving reading suggestions, or if we don't know, we say, we'll find out. And sometimes it becomes a question on a listener questions episode. And today we have a lot of examples of that. That's right. So let's jump right in. Our first question comes from Zach in Minnesota.

6:00Zach has a question about why snowflakes are all different. Hey there, extraordinaries. It's winter here in Minnesota and we just got a ton of snow. My dad took a really great picture of a beautifully symmetrical snowflake. I understand why snowflakes tend to form hexagonally, I think, because of the crystallization pattern of water. But I don't understand why snowflakes so often come out looking so perfectly symmetrical. Why should they form exactly the same intricate crystallization on one arm as opposed to the other arm? I know this isn't a universal thing. Some snowflakes aren't symmetrical, but so many are.

6:40It just seems unlikely? Is this just because there are so many snowflakes? Or is there something deeper going on? Look forward to hearing your thoughts. Now, Daniel, if you and I were really good at this, we would have saved this for a Christmas episode. But instead, we're going to release it in the middle of the summer. That's when people want snow, right? That's when they're missing it. You know, in the middle of winter, people are like, oh, don't talk to me about snow. I'm fed up with it. Well, I guess it depends on where you are on this planet, right? It's winter somewhere. So, okay, this is going to be a really good episode for the Australians if they're into snow.

7:14Or if you're sweltering in Texas this summer, listen to this frosty episode about snowflakes. Amazing. All right. So, Daniel, I have to admit that I don't know why each snowflake has a unique shape. Can we start there before we get to why they're symmetrical? Yeah, I think that is the right direction to start from. This is a really cool question because I think Zach is thinking about how the snowflakes form. And he's wondering, like, how can one arm form the same pattern as the arm on the other side? Is there some global force controlling it? And so you're right. We need to think about the symmetry and the diversity of these objects.

7:52And snowflakes are really fascinating. And as it turns out, the cutting edge of human understanding of snowflakes doesn't have a complete answer to this question. Snowflakes remain mysterious. Yes, that's right. Fascinating. There's not enough money in snowflakes, man. But if you go out into a snowstorm and you put out your hand, you'll see snowflakes land on your palm. And you can look at them briefly just before they melt. And you notice they are not all the same. There's an enormous variety of snowflakes from this pattern and that pattern and the other pattern. And, you know, people have known this for a long, long time.

8:25There's this famous quote from Thoreau who says, How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated. Oh, beautiful. But the answer is science, Thoreau. But science. But he was prescient about this, even though he didn't understand it. The answer is something about the chemistry of air, which we'll get to. I mean, you said a word I don't like, but let's move on anyway. So your question was about the symmetry. So let's start with that. Why do snowflakes form this weird six-pronged pattern anyway? And that does come down to chemistry, how the water molecules themselves bond to form the nexus of the crystal at the core.

9:02But let's back up and start with like, how does snow form? Where does it come from? It comes from water freezing in clouds. And the things I understand about water is we're all familiar with ice and then liquid water and of course, water vapor, steam, right? But water has complicated chemistry depending on the pressure. So down at the surface in normal atmospheric pressure, water has those three phases. But if you go up into the upper atmosphere or out into space, for example, where pressure is very, very low, there is no liquid water. There's only solid and gas. And so if you have solid water and you heat it up, you don't get liquid water out in space.

9:39You get vapor. It goes directly from solid to gas. So there aren't three phases everywhere. You can look up this phase diagram of water to learn more. And that's going to turn out to be key. So what happens is you have the atmosphere and there's warm, moist air that gets pushed upward when it hits a front and that water condenses into droplets. So the air is also filled with like tiny dust particles and each of those like nucleate a tiny little droplet. And that's what a cloud is. Cloud is all these water droplets that have been nucleated as warm, moist air has gone up and the water sort of comes out of the solution of the air.

10:13And enucleated just means it's like surrounding the piece of dust? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah, like you might ask, why do you get a water droplet here and not one centimeter or one micron over? Like why do they form and where they form and not somewhere else? The answer is dust. It's sort of like the way in the early universe, we had like slight over densities in the plasma. And that's what gravity grabbed onto to nucleate the formation of what turned into galaxies and stuff like. Why do galaxies form here and there? There has to be a reason it starts. And in the case of water droplets, it's tiny particles of dust.

10:45I heard it was also tiny bacteria that are in the atmosphere. Is that true? Are there bacteria around there forming snowflakes? There are bacteria out there. And dust is a very broad term. It includes lots of tiny stuff, you know, the way like sand does. And if you zoom in on it, there's an amazing variety of stuff in the atmosphere. We just call it dust. We could have a whole other episode about like, what is dust? Sure. That sounds fascinating. Anyway, you put all these together. You have a cloud. A cloud is like a million tons of water hanging there in the air. Sort of amazing. So now temperatures drop, right?

11:20And some of those droplets freeze. Some of them evaporate, become a vapor. but some of them freeze and you get a little crystal. And so here's where the chemistry comes in. You have this water molecule, which is like an oxygen and two hydrogens. And the two hydrogens come off at an angle, right? It's not like a line where you have hydrogen, oxygen, hydrogen. If you've seen like a little drawing of a water molecule, you know the hydrogens like pull close together. The angle between them is like 104 degrees or something. And so when these things come together to make a crystal, they click together sort of like Lego bricks, right?

11:52There's bonds between them. and that makes a little hexagon. So you link up six water molecules. The oxygens are like the vertices on a hexagon. And then the bond between the oxygen and one hydrogen is like the edge of that hexagon. And then there are six hydrogen molecules sort of sticking out. But it makes this ring, this hexagonal ring. And then you just keep adding water molecules and it builds out and out and out and you get a hexagonal crystal. Okay, so why do you get six in the center? Is that just available binding sites? Yeah, I think it's because... Chemistry, man. You get six because of the angle.

12:28So imagine your oxygen atom and it has two hydrogens coming off and it's 100 degrees between them, which means it's like 260 degrees on the other side, right? So the other water molecule comes in with its hydrogen. It comes around the back on that big open space and it splits that in half. Okay. And that's what determines the angle. So half of 260, you get about 130. and that's the angle there that you build up to make the hexagons. Got it. Okay. I remember in organic chemistry, there was a reaction called a backside attack, and the biologists in that class, we could not get over that. Anyway, all right, moving on.

13:02All right. So initially, you have this tiny, tiny crystal. It's like microns wide. And by the way, if you are out shopping and you see something called hexagonal water, that's a scam. It's not better for you. It's just pseudoscience, supplemental nonsense. I've never heard of that. What are they claiming? I don't know. I don't even want to give them more airtime. Okay, save your money, people. Exactly. All right, so what we're talking about so far is just the core of the snowflake, right? It's this hexagonal crystal. And that can require like a million of these droplets. Wow. You have a tiny number of snowflakes compared to the number of droplets.

13:38It really takes a lot of droplets to make one snowflake. So why doesn't the snowflake just become infinite? Why at some point does it stop accumulating more waters? Well, it has limited time in the cloud. So what happens next is you have this seeded crystal, which blows around inside the cloud, accumulating more and more, and then eventually gets so heavy that it drops. And so it's a limited time in the cloud. Otherwise, it would form like a cloud-sized crystal, which would be awesome. And maybe that happens on some alien planet. But then it falls on your head, and that would be too much. So we're set up now to answer Zach's question.

14:11We start with this crystal, and we understand why it's a hexagon. but then why does it form six identical arms, each of which are the same on one crystal, but different from all the other crystals, right? And when I was first reading about this, my hypothesis was maybe it's some impurity in the crystal where something has happened at the core, which then determines how it grows outwards, right? You need something coordinating across the arms. But it turns out it's not that at all. And we know that because of amazing experiments done by a physicist, Ukichiro Nakaya in Hokkaido in Japan in the 1930s.

14:46He was really curious about snowflakes. He just like went for walks and saw snowflakes and he asked the same question, but he wanted to figure it out. He did all these experiments. So he replicated the conditions of a cloud in the lab. And what he saw was that the formation of the crystal beyond the initial seed depends extremely sensitively on the temperature and on the density of water vapor. So for example, you can get these like weird long needles that form and you crank up the temperature a little bit and you get thin plates or you get dendrites or you get another formation. You crank it up another little bit and you get back to needles or back to columns.

15:22And so there's a lot of really complicated like chemistry and solid state physics that's happening there where these crystals are forming in certain patterns. Again, super duper sensitive to the density and the temperature. Okay. I'm following you there, but I still feel like there's a jump to make to hit symmetry. So now start with your core of your crystal, right? Your core of your crystal is some hexagon. Now it's going to blow through the cloud. The cloud is not uniform in density and temperature. There are regions of higher density. There are regions of lower density. There are colder and warmer regions.

15:52As that snowflake blows through the cloud, its crystals grow depending on the density and temperature it's experiencing moment to moment. So like right now, it grows in this certain pattern. Oh, then the density drops. Now it's going to make needles. Oh, now the density goes up. Oh, now it's back to making these flat things. And so that's what controls the growth of each of the arms. And because all of the arms experience the same unique path through the cloud, which gives it a unique temperature and density history, that's why every snowflake is different. If two snowflakes had exactly the same trajectory through the cloud, you would expect them to be exactly the same.

16:29And that's probably true, but impossible to test, right? So we think the variety of snowflakes comes from their individual experience through the temperature and density fluctuations in the cloud, which control their growth. And that also explains why they're the same on an individual snowflake, because on an individual snowflake, all the arms have the same experience, the same history through the density and the temperature. So it's really kind of an awesome probe through the cloud. That's amazing. Yeah. And beautiful. And I'm trying to pull together the Hallmark version. We're all a result of the unique paths that we take.

17:05Anyway, very cool. It's very cool. And it's sort of amazing and lucky. And it's another example of how amazing complexity emerges in our world. You know, this could have been totally boring. It could have been that snowflakes all just form hexagons and then drop and they're all the same. And like, yeah, hexagons are cool. But because they're so sensitive to density and temperature, we get this incredible variety of beautiful forms. It amazes me. It makes me wonder about that same philosophical question we talked about before. Like, why do we think that this kind of stuff is beautiful? Are Are we programmed to do it somehow?

17:34Is it because we evolved on this planet? Or is it just something deep about being alive and aware in the universe? Like, do aliens find their ugly planet beautiful also? Well, it is now the peak heat and humid period in Virginia. So I am looking forward to seeing the snow, as you said. Let's see if Zach feels satisfied with this unique answer. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. Thank you for the beautiful answer to my question about these beautiful crystals, especially since it meant wading into a bit of chemistry to do so. I, too, was surprised that the crystal shape was not intrinsic to the nucleation dust, but rather a kind of record of the snowflake experience as it drifts through its cloud.

18:15It makes me wonder if there are other polar molecules that could form snowflakes with other basic patterns instead of hexagons, like squares or triangles, or if there would be some molecules that would tend to make 3D structures instead of planar ones. Anyhow, on a personal note, my son was born just a week ago, and you have me smiling thinking about how he's going to gather experiences as he grows to become something unique and beautiful as well. Thanks again, guys.

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21:32All right, Daniel, this is quite possibly the most important question we've ever answered on the show. Because it determines what you're going to have for your birthday dinner. Maybe, maybe. And also his biology. So that automatically puts it in the top 50%. But let's enjoy this amazing question from Bernard in Munich. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. This is Bernhard from Munich in Germany. I understand that flamingos are pink because of their diet. But is the pink color just in their feathers or also in their flesh? And could I become pink if I would start eating flamingos instead of my usual vegetarian food?

22:08Love your show. Bye. Incredible. How seriously do you think Bernard is considering abandoning his vegetarianism? Do we have a weighty responsibility here? You know, so I was reading about the frequency at which people drop vegetarianism. And it is pretty high. I think it's something like 60 to 75 percent of the people who become vegetarians will not stay vegetarians. But I really doubt that he's going to drop his vegetarianism for flamingos. and not least of all, because it would be very hard for him to get his hands on a flamingo. Well, your husband is a dedicated vegetarian, isn't he? He is, yeah.

22:47He's been a vegetarian for 20 years. And I think the worst thing that I have done to him during our relationship is I once left a few pounds of turducken in his fridge when we were dating and I forgot it was there. And so he found, what is it? A turkey inside of a duck inside of a chicken. I think you have that backwards, but it doesn't matter. Sorry, a chicken inside you were right. Anyway, in his refrigerator, and he was pretty grossed out. Anyway, sorry, honey. Good thing there wasn't a flamingo in there as well. That's right. That's right. We did look up. Somebody had managed to get like 24 creatures inside of each other, and that was the max.

23:22All right. Well, let's get an answer to Bernard's question. Tell us from the beginning, why are flamingos pink anyway? Right. All right. So there are actually six different species of flamingos, and they are all rose-colored. They get their color through their diets. And so they eat algae, they eat crustaceans, and these organisms make their own colors called carotenoids. So they have pigments, but they aren't necessarily pink. So some organisms have ways of metabolizing carotenoids to get them to be particular colors. And so the way that the flamingos metabolize the carotenoids that they get from their food turns them pink.

23:58So metabolize means does chemistry on them. Does chemistry on them. And basically changes their color. So the things they eat are not pink, but they eat this stuff and the stuff has something in it and they do chemistry inside and that makes them pink. Is that right? That's right. Yep. So they're filter feeders. And so they're eating lots and lots of tiny little things with carotenoids that they turn pink. And is it good for the flamingos to be pink? Do they care? Is it helpful in some way? Is it just like a weird oddity in our universe? There's some debate over why they're pink, but it does seem that being pink is an indicator of how healthy you are.