In a crystal we have clear evidence of the existence of a formative life principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is nonetheless a living being
There's something very magical about water and what happens to it when it freezes. I don't think there's anything else in the world, perhaps in our universe, that is quite like ice.
During the course of my research, I had had occasion to examine not only simple compounds, salts and oxides, but also a great number of minerals.
Normally, you would not call ice a mineral.
ice contains no future , just the past, sealed away. As if they're alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way- cleanly, clearly. That's the essence of ice, the role it plays.
Snowflakes fascinate me... Millions of them falling gently to the ground... And they say that no two of them are alike! Each one completely different from all the others... The last of the rugged individualists!
How do we know for sure that no two snowflakes are the same - we haven't got anybody watching.
They say that there can never be two snowflakes that are exactly alike, but has anyone checked lately?
The cause of the six-sided shape of a snowflake is none other than that of the ordered shapes of plants and of numerical constants; and since in them nothing occurs without supreme reason-not, to be sure, such as discursive reasoning discovers, but such as existed from the first in the Creators's design and is preserved from that origin to this day in the wonderful nature of animal faculties, I do not believe that even in a snowflake this ordered pattern exists at random.
Selenite occurs in abundance in well formed clear crystals of several inches in length.
Science does not emerge in some perfect, complete crystalline form.
The last thing I have to say is that ice is the past tense of water. I've always wanted to write that sentence and now I have.
On April 8, 1982, I was alone in the electron microscope room when I discovered the Icosahedral Phase that opened the field of quasi-periodic crystals.
In the range of inorganic nature. I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snowdrift, seen under warm light.
