It is the most efficient shape for packing/stacking. It provides the most area for a given perimeter. Bees use it:
These are made by living things of course, but perhaps there's a similar physical reason why this shape is occurring.
Absolutely. 6 nearly equal sides is hard to get naturally, unless this is a giant fractal.
snowflakes
Maybe we found the aliens sooner than expected. I always wanted to meet the Vulcans or Klingons.
It is the most efficient shape for packing/stacking. It provides the most area for a given perimeter. Bees use it:
These are made by living things of course, but perhaps there's a similar physical reason why this shape is occurring.
What's a fractal? Hope it's not like a henway!
From the article. Yes this looks like a hexagon, but to say it's precise is gross misuse of the word and leads me to believe Kevin is mathematically challenged. It's like saying earth is in a precise circular orbit around the sun.
Well it's not unknown, e.g., honeycomb, benzene, thermal cells in a thin film - the last one being particularly apropos.
The hexagonal close pack is what causes this. When deformable "things" are close packed, hexagons result. The thing, or item that's close packed in this case is a convection cell. If you've ever made coffee and didn't stir it so well, then let it sit motionless while it cools, you'd see hexagonal structures, especially if there was some powder like cocoa in it.
In this pic there are 2 components to the cloud. They don't mix very well. That's most likely, because the lighter stuff is condensing significantly. Nevertheless the dark stuff, that appears like voids, does not mix and is expanding and flowing out of the clouds. It is less dense and is coming out of the cloud with a much higher velocity. That means there's an effective tension in the bulk of the white stuff, which is the eqivalent to being "pushed" by the dark stuff. The direction of the convections in the pic are up and out, and as the stuff moves outward it slows and resists the outward flow of the stuff moving out from the center. The stuff that makes up the voids is probably hot normal atmosphere, that resulted when the plumes of cloud material condensed as it shot up. The condensation results in a large release of heat to the atmosphere.
6 nearly equal sides is hard to get naturally, unless this is a giant fractal.
Basalt columns.