Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does by Philip Ball

Author:Philip Ball [Ball, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

HEXAGONAL NEST CELLS

A wasp (Vespula vulgaris) working on its nest. Why and how does it make the cells hexagonal?

Evidently there are no agents shaping these rafts as bees do with their combs. All that’s guiding the pattern are the laws of physics. Those laws evidently have definite preferences, such as the bias toward three-way junctions of bubble walls. The same is true of more complicated foams. If you pile up bubbles in three dimensions by blowing through a straw into a bowl of soapy water you’ll see that when bubble walls meet at a vertex, it’s always a four-way union with angles between the intersecting films roughly equal to about 109°—an angle related to the four-faceted geometric tetrahedron.

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