JAD ABUMRAD: Wait, wait. Don't. Shh! Let me just hit record. Okay, now what were you saying spontaneously a moment ago? [laughs]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today?

ROBERT: Bliss.

JAD: And in our last segment, we met a guy who dreamt of a perfect world where words could never muck things up. Got a little carried away.

ROBERT: Yeah. And so let's forget about dreams.

JAD: Forget about them.

ROBERT: Now we're gonna look for perfection right here in the physical world.

LATIF NASSER: Okay. So—so this story ...

JAD: And we're gonna do it with the perfect person ...

ROBERT: Latif Nasser.

LATIF: It begins with a birthday present.

ROBERT: Hmm.

LATIF: It's February 9, 1880. Six miles outside the tiny town of Jericho, Vermont. And we're on a farm, a family farm—the Bentley family farm. And this scrawny 15-year-old kid named Wilson gets a microscope from his mother.

JAD: Mmm.

LATIF: So it's February and it's Vermont. And so naturally, the first thing this kid does is he grabs a handful of snow, picks out a single flake and he puts it under the microscope. And what he sees is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. It's ethereal and perfect. He calls them "Masterpieces," as if they're these, you know, great works of art.

JAD: He calls them that in his 15-year-old diary?

LATIF: Well, looking back, he talked about that moment and what he was thinking when he sort of first saw it. But obviously, you know, within minutes or maybe even seconds, these masterpieces just disappeared without leaving any evidence that they ever existed. They just sort of evaporate.

JAD: Huh.

LATIF: And as he remembers it, he sort of decides then and there that he's gonna dedicate his whole life to documenting these masterpieces. Otherwise, no one will ever know they even existed.

JAD: He's gonna spend his whole life documenting snowflakes?

LATIF: Yeah. Yeah.

ROBERT: It's a good life, Jad. And it pays well.

LATIF: Right! That's exactly what his father said. His father thought he was—you know, he was just lazy and didn't want to do the farming chores.

ROBERT: [laughs] Oh, I see. His father says, "Milk the goats!" And he goes, "No, Dad! The beauty! The beauty!"

LATIF: Right. Right. And apparently he was a real—he was really good at digging potatoes, but he just sort of was so busy futzing around with his microscope that, you know ...

JAD: I don't like this kid. I don't like him.

ROBERT: He offends your work ethic.

JAD: It does so.

ROBERT: What happens next?

LATIF: So he takes his microscope, and he moves it to this unheated woodshed behind the house. And he starts sketching these snowflakes, right?

JAD: Hmm.

LATIF: And while he's sketching, he can't even breathe because he was worried that his breath would melt his specimen. So he's sort of holding his breath, and drawing these, you know, extremely complex crystals that can take you maybe—you know, maybe an hour to draw, but depending on the temperature, the humidity, the size of the crystal, he had—at most, he had five minutes, right?

ROBERT: Hmm.

LATIF: At the end of that, he looks at them all, and he's not satisfied. He just felt like he wasn't doing it justice, you know? What he calls these, like, miracles of beauty. So Bentley persuades his mother who persuades his father to buy him a camera.

JAD: Wait a sec. Wait, wait, wait, wait. 1880. We're in February, 1880. Have we entered into the era of picture taking?

LATIF: Just barely. And for a farming family this was, like, a lot of money, but they buy it for him and he gets it, and he sort of jerry-rigs it to the microscope. And at age 19, Wilson Bentley is the first person ever in history to photograph a snowflake.

ROBERT: Okay, I'm gonna cue the snowflake celebration music here.

LATIF: Right. From then on basically for the next 46 winters until he died, every snowfall, every blizzard, this guy Bentley would stand in the doorway of his little shack, holding out a wooden tray with thick mittens, because he would wear these, they're almost like oven mitts to make sure that none of his body heat would kind of leak out and inadvertently melt any of the snow. So he'd sort of stand there and sort of give it a once-over with his eye. If nothing was promising, he basically had a turkey feather, and he would sort of just wipe it clean with this turkey feather until he did find something he liked. And then he would take this tiny little wooden rod, and he would just sort of really delicately tap the center of the crystal and, like, really, really, really gently lift it off and then transfer it onto a glass slide so that he could put it under the microscope and he could photograph it.

LATIF: Over the course of his life, he basically photographed about 5,000 snow crystals. For his whole life he was just a farmer doing this kind of as a hobby, but he sold copies of these photos for five cents a pop to places like Harvard and the British Museum and the US Weather Bureau, research journals, magazines like Nature and National Geographic. And I mean, you've already seen the photos. Like, you've gotten them on a Christmas card, they're on your, like, ugly Christmas sweater in your closet somewhere.

JAD: [laughs] Robert's wearing a shirt with them on right now.

ROBERT: Yeah.

LATIF: [laughs] They're everywhere. They're beautiful, symmetrical, really clean and complex. A lot of the greatest scientists who ever lived, like Descartes and Kepler and Hooke, they all tried to sketch and draw and kind of capture the essence of snowflakes, but none of them could do it as well as this one obsessive loner from Jericho, Vermont, whose photos were perceived to be kind of more faithful to nature than anybody else's. But that was until this other guy came on the scene, this German guy.

ROBERT: Cue the other guy Germanic theme music.

LATIF: Yes. Yes. He was a German meteorologist named Gustav Hellmann.

ROBERT: Gustav Hellmann.

LATIF: Not of the mayonnaise fame, I don't believe.

ROBERT: [laughs] I hadn't even thought of that, actually.

JAD: [laughs] So Hellmann. Is this—is he a contemporary of Bentley?

LATIF: Yeah, he is. And he's working on his own book about weather, and so he hires a kind of a micro-photographer who's another German guy named Richard Neuhauss.

ROBERT: A micro—is that a very teeny photographer who he kept on his desk?

LATIF: Yeah, he's microscopic himself, and he just takes normal-sized photographs.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: Anyhow, he hires this guy and they take a bunch of photos using basically similar technology—a camera and a microscope, essentially. But what they find is totally different. They do not find the elegant, symmetrical ideal snow crystals that Bentley found. The crystals they found were, like, flawed, lopsided. Usually, like, broken.

ROBERT: Hmm.

LATIF: And the way I think of it, it was like a Martian who had only ever seen, like, glossy fashion magazines had just been given some, like, random family photo album, and it was like, "Oh, wow. This is—they're not so pretty. Like, these are kind of ugly."

JAD: [laughs] "These humans!"

LATIF: "These humans, they're not all symmetrical." But these Germans, they basically called him out. They basically thought Bentley was a fraud. There was a particular way that Bentley prepared his photographs. What he would do is he would use a penknife to scrape the negative around the snow crystal, which is what gave it that kind of nice black background, because he thought it would kind of put it in maybe starker relief. And the German guys said it's misleading, that it kind of mutilates the snowflakes.

JAD: Huh. But wait, so he's photographing these snowflakes and then significantly messing with the photograph?

LATIF: Exactly right. Exactly right. So here's a quote from the photographer who said, quote, "In many images, Bentley did not limit himself to improving the outlines. He let his knife play deep inside the heart of the crystals so that fully arbitrary figures emerged."

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: Oh, so he's ...

ROBERT: Well, I don't know. That doesn't seem so—it's no longer a candid, is it?

LATIF: Well, that's the question. So they basically lob this, and this is kind of going in these journals, but Bentley basically launches a counter-attack, and what he says is that, in fact, those guys were wrong, that not correcting your photographs was—and he used this word, like, "perverse." To him, why wouldn't you remove specks of dust or other imperfections? Why photograph a broken snowflake when you could photograph a complete one? So this is a quote from Bentley. He said, "A true scientist wishes above all to have his photographs as true to nature as possible. And if retouching will help in this respect, then it is fully justified."

JAD: So he thought his retouched snowflakes were truer than the normal ones?

LATIF: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The scientist is supposed to be kind of this very experienced, almost like a sage who has seen every different variation on a snowflake, but can sort of bring that all together in one drawing, one sketch, one photograph. And that's the true snowflake.

ROBERT: So if I brought him a slightly gloppy snowflake and said, "Look, this is what fell on my nose, and this is a true snowflake because it actually fell from the sky and it's—you know, it was unenhanced." He would say that ...

LATIF: He would say, "Robert, you're an amateur. Like, this is—this is not good work. You know, this is an aberration. This is an abnormality. Why would you choose to kind of highlight an abnormality as opposed to kind of this true ideal snowflake?" You know?

JAD: And does that one exist?

LATIF: [laughs]

JAD: I mean, that's the key question for me. Like, does the ideal snowflake exist in nature?

ROBERT: You think there are such things, exquisitely beautiful.

JAD: I would like to think that there are.

LATIF: No. So I think, if my facts are right, the world snowflake expert is actually in Pasadena, California.

LATIF: All right. Check, check, check, check.

ROBERT: In sunny Southern California?

LATIF: Yeah.

LATIF: I'm wearing a t-shirt. I have sunscreen lathered, and I am going to talk to the world authority on snow.

KEN LIBBRECHT: How are you?

LATIF: His name is Ken Libbrecht. He's a professor of physics at Caltech. He is—in a way, he's like the modern-day Wilson Bentley because he takes a ton of snowflake pictures.

KEN LIBBRECHT: I've taken about 10,000 now. So ...

LATIF: And he actually makes snowflakes.

KEN LIBBRECHT: Oh, yeah.

LATIF: Artificially.

LATIF: Okay. Wow. So this is a giant tank. This is of nitrogen here?

KEN LIBBRECHT: Never mind that.

LATIF: Okay.

LATIF: And to get to your question about the ideal snowflake, a few things. So number one, there are a bajillion different kinds.

KEN LIBBRECHT: Dendritic, crystal stellar dendrites, needles and columns and hollow columns, and the sectored plates.

LATIF: That sort of thing. The second thing is that snowflakes are never static. They're never one thing. So at every single moment as it falls to the Earth, it's either growing or shrinking, depending on the kind of trajectory through the different pockets of weather as it's moving down. So there is no real platonic ideal form of a snowflake because it's so in flux.

KEN LIBBRECHT: I mean, there's no such thing as a perfect snowflake.

LATIF: But that doesn't stop Ken Libbrecht from looking.

KEN LIBBRECHT: You know, I tried up in Tahoe and Japan, Vermont, Michigan.

LATIF: He travels all over the world looking for Bentley's perfect flakes.

KEN LIBBRECHT: Alaska. Been to Alaska. Sweden. One of my favorite spots is Northern Ontario. A little town called Cochrane.

LATIF: Population 5,487.

LATIF: So where do you go in Cochrane? Do you—just anywhere? They're just falling all over the place?

KEN LIBBRECHT: Mostly it's the parking lot of my hotel. [laughs]

LATIF: But he says there's a lot of waiting involved.

KEN LIBBRECHT: It only really snows well about once a week.

LATIF: Even then things have to be Goldilocks perfect.

KEN LIBBRECHT: If the clouds are too high, then they evaporate a little on the way down. They don't look very pretty.

LATIF: Or ...

KEN LIBBRECHT: If the clouds are too light or too heavy.

LATIF: That's bad too.

KEN LIBBRECHT: And a lot of times the temperature's wrong.

LATIF: If you want those Christmas card supermodel snowflakes, you need to have exactly ...

KEN LIBBRECHT: Minus 15. That's five degrees Fahrenheit.

LATIF: You need to have high humidity, not so much wind, so that they'll putter down slowly and have more time to grow.

KEN LIBBRECHT: But every once in a while, I mean, when the conditions are right, you go outside all, you know, hopeful and anticipating and you're just like, "Oh, crap. There's nothing but garbage out here." So you go back inside and read some more email, and you come back a half an hour later. Nope, still lousy. And then a half hour later. Nope, still lousy. And, you know, you do this for hours, and then all of a sudden they'll get really good. And then I'm just out there frantically trying to collect as many as I can. One of the things I like to think about is, you know, here I am with my little piece of cardboard in the middle of a continent where it's snowing all the time. And so I am catching some incredibly small number of these things for a brief period and getting some really cool pictures. And so you kind of wonder what else is out there? What are you missing? I mean, imagine just all the beautiful little works of art that are just falling down totally unnoticed, and then they just disappear. I mean, stuff that is far prettier than the pictures I have. Because they're out there. You know they're out there. Statistically they're out there. And so, you know, there's just an awful lot of really gorgeous things that just are, like you say, they're just totally ephemeral and you'll never see them. And they're falling constantly. So you sort of want to just stop the world and, you know, go look at them. [laughs]

JAD: Thanks to Latif Nasser, and to Ken Libbrecht, who wrote the book, The Secret Life of a Snowflake.

[MATT: This is Matt Neilly-Dawson from Asheville, North Carolina, and bliss is this sound.]

[baby laughing]

[MATT: That's the sound of my seven-month-old daughter reacting to my puppy dog licking her feet.]

[IGOR: Hi, my name is Igor, and I'm calling from Novi Sad, Serbia. Bliss is Indiana Jones, all three parts!]

[STEVE: Hi, Radiolab. This is Steve Strogatz. Bliss is the taste of hot pastrami at Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side of New York City. We live four or five hours away from New York and don't get there very often. And so I spend a lot of time in between visits thinking about that first taste of the hot pastrami. So for me, that's bliss. I get to think about some kind of almost unattainable perfection. Except that it is attainable—I just show up and there it is.]

[MARY: This is Mary Roach, and I'm in Oakland, California. And I have a list of bliss. My bliss list: number one, laughing uncontrollably, number two, zero gravity; number four, the first 10 seconds in a hot, hot bath; number nine, a raw oyster, very fresh, but no larger than an infant's ear.]

 

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