Seeing Snowflakes

This is what I found interesting from Ken Libbrecht's website @ SnowCrystals.com + Ken Libbrecht is the chairman of the physics department @ the California Institute of Technology + he studies the physics of snow crystals.

Here is what he has to say about snowflakes:
A snow crystal forms up in the atmosphere + it starts with, say, a small water droplet which freezes into a very tiny piece of ice and then that grows and gets this hexagonal shape + then, as it gets larger, these corners of the hexagon sprout branches and they can become very elaborate as it grows larger + one thing you can do, as a physicist, is you can try to calculate how many ways there are to make a snowflake, and I've done that + it's a very large number + The number of ways to make a complex snowflake is far greater than the total number of atoms in the universe + with such large numbers, you can say fairly confidently that if you looked at all the snowflakes that grew on earth, you would never see one that looked exactly the same.