Daniel looks out the window at snow and asks why it's white. Water isn't white. Ice isn't really white. So why is snow?

The answer starts with a correction.

A single ice crystal is transparent. See-through, like glass. Light passes right through it. So a snowflake -- which is essentially a tiny, complex ice crystal -- isn't white either.

But when millions of them pile up together, something happens. Light enters the snow, hits a surface, and bounces. Then hits another surface, and bounces again. And again. After bouncing over and over through all those crystals and air pockets, it comes back out in every direction at once. And sunlight contains all the colors -- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet -- all mixed together. Snow scatters all of those colors equally. When all the colors reach your eye at once, that is what we se ...