Freeze Frame Retired Orono physicist finds science and art in a winter storm

This time of year, things get pretty flaky at Paul Camp’s house.

Though Camp, 83, retired from the University of Maine’s physics department in 1996, his research continues. When the skies are clear, there’s little hint of what goes on in the makeshift lab Camp created on his back porch. But as soon as the snow starts to fly, you can find him harvesting snowflakes on a block of Plexiglas placed on the doorstep. When enough snow has fallen, he takes it inside the chilly room, places it under a camera equipped with a magnifying lens and a fluorescent halo lamp, and snaps a picture.

“I do it because it pleases me,” Camp said. “I’ve been working on ice physics for years. This is the art form for ice physics.”

In the late ’50s and early ’60s, he worked at the Army Cold Regions Research Station in Hanover, N.H., studying the electrical properties of ice. He later worked at the University of Michigan as part of a National Science Foundation program that promoted the teaching of physics in college. In 1967, he came to Orono as a physics professor, and his interest in ice and snow hasn’t waned.

“Ice is interesting,” Camp said. “It’s the water that is interesting of course, because the water molecule is the one without which we wouldn’t be.”

Visiting the Orono home he shares with his wife, Polly, is like auditing a fun, interesting physics class. The professor in Camp shines through as he flips the pages of his photo album, pointing out the structure of various snowflakes. He keeps meticulous records of the time, date and temperature for each picture, which he easily relates to the forms.

“What I’ve tried to do is follow a storm and see how the structure changes all the way through a storm,” Camp said. “A good storm is apt to have a lot of turbulence.”

A lot of turbulence usually equals many fragments – bits and pieces of snowflakes that have been broken up in the atmosphere.

“You’ll see they’re all kind of messy,” Camp says, pointing to a picture that looks like pieces of white lint on black pants.

In real life, snowflakes rarely look like they do in children’s books or science texts. They don’t have eight sides – most are hexagonal – and they often break on their way down. While the old adage that no two snowflakes are the same rings true, they do fall into a limited number of categories.

Early researchers such as W.A. Bentley, a Vermont farmer with a penchant for flakes, and Ukichiro Nakaya, a Japanese professor who studied natural and artificial snow, developed classification systems for the forms they saw.

What they found were long, thin needles; scrolls; dendrites, which look like tree branches or deer antlers; hexagonal sector plates; hollow cylinders; bullets; and tsuzumi, which is the Japanese word for tom-tom.

“Why are there so many varieties? Why would a crystal grow this way?” Camp asked. “It isn’t that the crystal changes, it’s that the environment changes.”

As the temperature dips, the flakes become more basic, taking the shape of needles, cylinders and bullets. But the flakes encounter several different temperature levels as they fall, and again if the wind carries them aloft. When there’s a fair amount of moisture in the air, the flakes become rimed, or covered with tiny ice crystals similar to the frost we see on our lawn in the fall.

“The most interesting snow seems to come when the temperature’s not too low,” Camp said, laughing. “Of course, I’m more likely to get out and take the pictures when the temperature’s not too low.”

During a recent visit, the temperature hovered at negative 3 degrees Celsius, and a light snow fell as Camp prepared to take pictures. He wrote down the temperature, date, conditions and time, removed a Plexiglas block from his freezer, and placed it outside.

In five minutes, the block was full, and he brought it into the porch and placed it under a microscope. The result was an unexciting mix of fragments and prismlike flakes, but that’s to be expected.

“This stuff is so fine,” he explained. “Most storms are like this – they’re confused.”

He took a picture anyway. Even if it wasn’t particularly artistic, it would serve as a record.

Camp’s research still focuses on the electrical processes in ice. Each snowflake has an electric charge, and through years of study, he has concluded that the charge has no effect on the form, but there are other factors to consider, such as the way the flakes change during the duration of a storm.

He no longer has a lab on campus, but the department lets him bring equipment home so he can continue his work, which has recently involved light refraction through gelatin. Even though he’s retired, he isn’t about to stop exploring the world around him. Along with the classes he attends at UMaine’s Penobscot Valley Senior College, his daily research keeps him busy.

“I go in and tinker a little bit,” Camp said. “I’m a physicist because I enjoy things, I enjoy understanding things.”