Why is the sky blue?

Bowser

Bowser

Namaste
Valued Senior Member
Let's have a stimulating discourse regarding the color of the sky, something to which all of us can relate and handle.
 
Why is the sky blue?

Because earth atmosphere acts as a prism (or lens). So sky seems blue when the sun above head, and seems yellow to red in the morning/afternoon.
 
The sky is blue due to Rayleigh Scattering.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/blusky.html

"The blue color of the sky is caused by the scattering of sunlight off the molecules of the atmosphere. This scattering, called Rayleigh scattering, is more effective at short wavelengths (the blue end of the visible spectrum). Therefore the light scattered down to the earth at a large angle with respect to the direction of the sun's light is predominantly in the blue end of the spectrum. "
 
Why is the sky blue?

Maybe it's been listening to too many Phil Collins records
 
Please everyone be nice to me but i always thought the sky was blue because of the reflection off the ocens.
 
Asguard, well now you know better.:)

But most of the sky isn't blue. Blue light is only a smal fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, and humans can only see the visble part. In reality the sky is saturated with all the other frequencies of which blue is only a tiny fraction.

Cris
 
Kinda lucky it's blue. Possibly my favourite colour. Might hafta move to another planet if it was some other colour.
 
Now see, this stuff really bores me! I don't think I can take much more of it. bbcboy, did you wash your hands today?
 
bowser
Sorry to hear we bore you in your own thread old bean.
Allow me to wash my hands of it and move on to something a little more stimulating.
(Wonders if there's a thread on needlepoiint or italian quilting???)


Love yourself every day:D
 
Whats with everyone picking on the smurfs. Just because you are short and blue everyone picks on you. I don't know. I think i am going to go tell papa smurf about all u people. picking on us poor defenceless smurfs :D
 
"Blue" describes the experience of the color, rather than the external cause of that experience. So, the sky is blue not just because of the compositon of it... that alone wouldn't give us a sensation of a blue sky. To get blue involved, we have to involve the way our eyes interact with photons and the methods through which the optic nerve sends the "data" to the brain and causes a pattern of neuron firings which result in the experience we call blue. This experience is logically and causally related to what's in the sky, but it's not at all the same composition as what's actually in the sky since what we experience isn't sky but is actually a pattern within the mind/brain.
 
Colour exists with or without human experience. It is a function of the movement of electromagnetic energy through matter.
 
You can use your own language where that's true, but it wouldn't be a very practical language, and it's not the way "color" is used English. What you're trying to call color is simply electromagnetic energy that when applied to eyes and interpreted by a brain becomes color... the electromagnetic waves themselves are not similar to the experience of a color, they're just electromagnetic waves that could be interpreted in a theoretically infinite number of ways. If you had a different sort of sensory apparatus that translated those same electromagnetic waves into something resembling the experience of a smell, you would be foolish to claim it's the same thing as the other experience which we call a color.
 
You know, I posted this thread as a form of protest and mockery. What the heck are you people doing here? Stop now.
 
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