Snowflake

Jonathan Kane

With winter comes the death for which its cold is known,
But joining it are fragile beings of its own,
Containing each a pattern found in one alone.
Could random chance allow such wonders to arise?
Or must the harmony their fleeting shapes comprise
Be fashioned by a master craftsman in the skies?

But no such craftsman can be found amid the storm,
For only simple laws to which its clouds conform
Are seen to cut the facets of their product’s form.
From smallest drop of water comes a seed of ice,
To grow in sixfold pattern as the blind device
Refines an angled edge, or branching points precise.

And yet, has not examination surely found
That chaos cannot generate a form so sound?
And in the squall where ragged wind and cloud abound,
Is not the ruling power one of disarray?
Would not a perfect product of this force betray
The omnipresent law that order must decay?

Within the tempest's hidden world of wind and sleet,
The frozen speck is born by sacrifice of heat:
A thermal duty every crystal must complete.
As in the tiny interactions of the sun,
Where power surges out as two are fused to one,
Such order may be taken from a form undone.

To see that from decay must every beauty grow,
That all the purest lilies must have graves below,
Extinguishes all hope, if one is doomed to know.
If this is so, what solace might we ever seek?
From no creative mind conceiving forms unique,
But only an entropic rust, and future bleak?

About the source of beauty, nothing can be said.
A thing cannot, when built from patterns of the dead,
By wishing be produced by something else instead.
But laws of nature show a glory of their own,
With deeper roots of order seen by them alone.
What Governor it is, or if, is never known.

The Science

This poem describes one of the physical principles upon which life is based: that entropy can be temporarily decreased in a small area, at the cost of an increase of entropy elsewhere. Erwin Schrödinger described this process in his book What is Life? as “the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.” This mechanism is presented using the metaphor of the formation of snow crystals, in which water molecules arrange themselves in an ordered pattern at the cost of increasing entropy through the release of heat.

The concept presented in poem deals indirectly with an argument often made by creationists: that if single-celled organisms had evolved into modern life forms, this would have violated the requirement for entropy to increase over time. But as with an individual organism or a snowflake, an increase in entropy has still occurred over the course of life’s evolution. The localised decrease of entropy in living things has come at the cost of the much larger increase occurring in the sun’s fusion reaction, which produces the energy necessary to sustain life on Earth.

The Poet

Jonathan Kane is an American science writer who is the editor and primary author of God’s Word or Human Reason? An Inside Perspective on Creationism, a 2016 book criticizing the creationist movement, and also is a semi-regular contributor to the evolution blog The Panda’s Thumb. He has been writing science poetry for about twenty years, usually with themes related to palaeontology, evolution, and natural history. His poetry has previously appeared in the magazines Prehistoric Times and Newsweek, and on the Palaeopoems website.

Next poem: String of Pearls (Dementropy) by Eric Arnold