Hexagonal packing
In 1610 a man called Johannes Kepler, better known for his laws of planetary motion, was walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague when a snowflake fell on the lapel of his coat. This made him wonder why if all snowflakes are different they still have a six sided structure, he wrote in a paper ‘There must be a cause why snow has the shape of a six-cornered starlet.’ Kepler realised that this had to have something to do with nature making them that way on purpose. He also noticed hexagons in other aspects of nature such as bee hives and pomegranates. He named this hexagonal packing and referred to it like so: ‘hexagonal packing must be the tightest possible, so that in no other arrangement could more pellets be stuffed into the same container.’ Kepler’s work was eventually proved almost 400 years later by a 1990s supercomputer. Despite the time lag Kepler’s work did eventually lead to the discovery of DNA, just because he saw a snowflake.
By Oliver
