Two snowflakes may actually be alike

“How likely is it that two snowflakes are alike? Very likely if we define alike to mean that we would have trouble distinguishing them under a microscope and if we include the crystals that hardly develop beyond the prism stagethat is, the smallest snow crystals,” Nelson said. “Good luck finding them though,” he added. “Even if there were only a million crystals and you could compare each possible pair once per secondthat is, very fastthen to compare them all would take you about a hundred thousand years.”