Are you sure of that?Treble wrote: Symmetry is caused, in part, by the fact that the "hole" on the opposite side of the most-recently attached molecule causes imbalance.
Actually I figured it's just because the flakes are not as random as it seems. Namely that the process is controlled by a couple of variables: temperature, humidity, and perhaps static electricity.
These variables vary throughout the cloud, but they hardly differ on distances of centimeters.
A snowflake while it's beeing formed travels its own trajectory through the cloud, giving each snowflake a different functions of temperature and humidity over time. That makes evey flake unique.
But since the variables don't vary on short scale, all the symmetric arms of the flake get exactly the same dependancies, and they develop in the same way.
1: Is there any known phenomena of stellar "drag" that might cause the earth's rotational speed to slow down over time? Say a period of 65 million years?
If you mean rotational movement as in "night-day" then it is. It's actually caused by our oceans of liquid water: you know moon causes water to move, the sun does exactly the same thing, though weaker.
And now a simple deduction:
moving the water takes energy, that then gets dissipated by friction
the energy is taken from earths rotational movement,
and hence earth's angular momentum decreases over time.
If you mean like "january-febuary" kind of rotational movement, then it's complicated. There is minimal friction with the space dust. But the main factor is gravitational interaction with other planets.
For example you can have earth come close to jupiter every 40 years. Depending on the orbital periods and phases jupiter will be either slowing down the earth or accelerating it!
Don't let it be said the forum goons won't help out one of their own.
