Why Nature Loves Hexagons

During a recent whirlwind tour of Ireland and Northern Ireland, we visited Giant’s Causeway as do scores of other tourists and locals. The geological formations are stunning and fascinating. My science-wired brain was immediately curious about how such a consistently hexagonal structure forms in nature.

In my quest for knowledge, I found a great article that quickly puts the hexagon’s appearance in nature into perspective. Author, John Wright, reviews the topic in Mystery solved: Why nature loves the hexagon, and why without it you’d be a puddle of goo

“We expect Nature to be a messy business, eschewing straight lines and simple geometries and consisting only of organic lumps and bumps, random arrangements or simple chaos, yet the resolutely Euclidean hexagon appears with remarkable frequency in the natural world. From the gargantuan to the sub-microscopic, hexagons are everywhere. One wonders why.

It’s all down to efficiency, utility and an occasional ability to form almost inadvertently. The hexagon is symmetrical, simple and enjoys the rare skill of allowing itself to tessellate (tile). Furthermore, as tessellating shapes go, it’s supreme as it can circumscribe the largest area for a given perimeter.”

Honeycomb, fruits, coral, turtles, crystals, snowflakes and planets are just some examples that show hexagon patterns. The dragonfly’s eyes are made of 30,000 hexagons!

The basalt columns of Giants Causeway are formed “by the shrinking of hot basalt as it cools from its molten state, very much like the roughly hexagonal cracking that occurs on your (once snow-covered) lawn after a summer drought. The massive and homogenous nature of the basalt ensures that the forces involved are evenly distributed and the fractures occur with great regularity and in the most economical of forms: the hexagon.”

“If you think you yourself to be free of hexagons, then I have to tell you that you’re actually largely built of them. Without hexagons, I’m afraid you would be an unpleasant puddle of goo on the carpet. It’s all down to the extraordinarily talented carbon atom.

Six of them join to form hexagonal ‘rings’, sometimes with a carbon atom replaced by that of another element. They’re found in many familiar biochemicals such as vanillin (vanilla), benzene, sugars, amino acids and even DNA. Some sugars have one ring, some two, and are therefore called mono and disaccharides respectively. Some of those in DNA are found in the ‘bases’ that carry the genetic information.”

Read the full article here.

I am fascinated by this seemingly simplistic geometric shape, and I will never look at a hexagon in quite the same way.

Thank you Northern Ireland, and Giants Causeway!