On 15 January 1885 a Vermont farmer called Wilson Bentley photographed a single snowflake through a microscope, the first person ever to do so. He went on to photograph more than 5,000, and never found two alike.
A physicist later calculated that the number of ways to make a complex snowflake is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. al-Badīʿ, the Originator, makes what has never been made before.
Start with what we know
Then take away everything it needs. What is left is not a bigger version of us. It is the Name.
Episode 1
In us
Human creativity is astonishing, and it always builds on something. Six ordinary Lego bricks of two by four studs can be combined in 915,103,765 different ways, a number calculated by the mathematician Søren Eilers. Every artist learns from teachers, every scientist from earlier papers, every inventor from 'prior art'. Even our most original ideas combine things that already existed. Human beings are real makers, but we always make from materials, rules and examples we were given.
Episode 2
In nature
In the forests of New Guinea, the male Vogelkop bowerbird builds a hut of sticks and decorates the ground in front with carefully arranged piles of flowers, berries, beetle wings and stones, sorted by colour. Each bird's display is different, and researchers have found that bowerbirds in different areas seem to have different 'styles'. It looks like art. But every bowerbird works within the instincts and materials it was given, to impress an audience. Nature's originality is variation within a pattern.
Episode 3
At our best
Kenneth Libbrecht, a physicist at Caltech, has spent decades growing snow crystals in his laboratory to understand how their shapes form. In an NPR interview he said that “the number of ways to make a complex snowflake is far greater than the total number of atoms in the universe”, so no two are likely ever to match. Each one is new. Yet every snowflake follows the same physics of water and ice, with six-fold symmetry. Its originality is novelty within law.
Episode 4
The Break
Take away precedent, template, materials, rules imposed from outside and an audience to impress. Every original thing we know is new within a pattern it did not make. al-Badīʿ originates without a model and without anything to work from, and the patterns themselves are His. A game can generate endless worlds from a seed and its rules; al-Badīʿ made the rules. “Originator of the heavens and the earth: when He decrees something, He only says to it ‘Be’, and it is” (Qur'an 2:117, our rendering).
Wilson Alwyn Bentley was born in 1865 on a farm in Jericho, Vermont, where winters bring a great deal of snow. As a teenager he was given an old microscope by his mother, and he spent hours looking at snowflakes, trying to draw them before they melted. He could never draw fast enough.
So he persuaded his parents to buy him a bellows camera, and attached it to the microscope. After months of failure, on 15 January 1885, when he was nineteen, he took the first photograph of a single snow crystal.
He carried on for the rest of his life, catching flakes on a black board, lifting them with a feather onto a glass slide, and photographing them in the cold before they could vanish. He made more than 5,000 images. Many neighbours thought he was wasting his time. He said that every crystal was a masterpiece of design and that no design was ever repeated.
In 1931, shortly before his death, a book of his photographs, Snow Crystals, was published. It is still in print. A farmer in a snowy village had shown the world how original even the smallest thing in creation can be.
What each faith says
Judaism
“Behold, I will do a new thing; Now shall it spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, And rivers in the desert.”
Isaiah gives God's voice to a people in exile: “Behold, I will do a new thing; now shall it spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.”
Jewish tradition sees God's creative power as ongoing: the morning prayers praise God who “in His goodness renews every day, continually, the work of creation”.
Christianity
“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.”
Christians speak of God making things new, not only in creation but in people's lives: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.”
That link between newness and Christ is distinctive to Christians. Christian artists and scientists have often seen their own creativity as a reflection of God's.
Islam
“Originator of the heavens and the earth. When He decrees something, He only says to it, “Be”, and it is.”
al-Badīʿ appears in 2:117 and 6:101: “Originator of the heavens and the earth.” The root b-d-ʿ means to bring something into being with no previous example. In a different form, bidʿa, it describes innovations in religion, which the tradition is cautious about: originality in creation belongs to God.
Imam ʿAlī, in the first sermon of the Nahj al-Balāgha, says God created without any example to follow and without experiment.
Same and different
Isaiah's 'new thing', Paul's 'new creation' and the Qur'an's 'Originator' all praise a God who makes what has never been before. All three see human creativity as a gift. Christians speak of newness especially in Christ; Jews and Muslims speak of God's creative command directly.
A moment to reflect
What is the most original thing you have ever made?
Does knowing that every snowflake is different change how you look at people?
Can anything we make ever be truly new?
Watch
Watch on YouTube ↗ · plays here on the live site; YouTube without tracking until you press play
New Scientist with Kenneth Libbrecht on how to grow a perfect snow crystal.
Watch on YouTube ↗ · plays here on the live site; YouTube without tracking until you press play
The Met Office explains how snowflakes form.
Watch on YouTube ↗ · plays here on the live site; YouTube without tracking until you press play
BBC Earth's Life Story: the bowerbird's grand performance.
Do it together
families / schoolsPaper snowflakes
Fold paper into six and cut snowflakes. Compare them: are any two the same? Read Qur'an 2:117 and Isaiah 43:19 together.
neighboursSnow watch
Next time it snows, catch flakes on a black cloth that has been in the freezer and look at them with a magnifying glass. Photograph them on a phone and share the best with your street.
Episode 1
