millie111
14 Answers
Dardaigh
Best answer!
ROMOS
Blue skies, smiling at me / Nothing but blue skies do I see ...
-- Irving Berlin
If you've ever wondered why, like Irving Berlin, you see "nothing but blue skies," you're in good company. It took many centuries and a lot of smart people -- including Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Thomas Young, James Clerk Maxwell and Hermann von Helmholtz -- to puzzle out the answer, in part because the solution encompasses so many components: the colors in sunlight, the angle at which solar illumination travels through the atmosphere, the size of airborne particles and atmospheric molecules, and the way our eyes perceive color.
Let's take the sky out of the equation for a moment and begin by looking at color. From a physics standpoint, color refers to the wavelengths of visible light leaving an object and striking a sensor, such as a human eye. These wavelengths might be reflected, or scattered, from an external source, or they might emanate from the object itself.
The color of an object changes depending on the colors contained in the light source; for example, red paint, viewed under blue light, looks black. Isaac Newton demonstrated with a prism that the white light of the sun contains all colors of the visible spectrum, so all colors are possible in sunlight.
In school, most of us learned that a banana appears yellow because it reflects yellow light and absorbs all other wavelengths. This is not accurate. A banana scatters as much orange and red as it does yellow, and scatters all of the colors of the visible range to some degree or other [source: Bohren]. The real reason it looks yellow relates to how our eyes sense light. Before we get into that, however, let's look at what color the sky actually is.
We'll do that next.
| 12 years ago. Rating: 16 | |
Ducky
Okay millie, will this be enough TU's? LOL!!!!
| 12 years ago. Rating: 15 | |
pythonlover
Congratulations and welcome to the "Why is the sky blue?" club!!
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| 12 years ago. Rating: 14 | |
Oops, I think you need to check your karma now.
lindilou
Now millie dear..(pretend I sound like Katherine Hepburn) I dare say you may have too much time on your hands darling girl! Rather than be swooned by ROMOS and his genius tactics, well dear, we ought go have tea out in the back gardens away from the din and roar of the crowds...shall we? And we'll enjoy the blue, blue yonder without a care or a worry for such things as why is the sky blue...or...well I can't think of a good one just now but here, here's the butler now...one lump or two millie?
| 12 years ago. Rating: 13 | |
doolittle
mycatsmom
because of the arrangement of the oxygen vs. the other elements when the sun filters thru it. And because God planned it that way, b/c He knew that the color of the clear,blue sky would make us happy :-)
| 12 years ago. Rating: 10 | |
jhharlan
jraynium
itsmee
hector5559
Free_Speech_is_not_f
jcmoramorocho
