This blog is now mostly about my teaching at Merton and Oxford. However, I thought I would occasionally insert a post about my learning as well. For the most part, this means learning from my colleagues, whom I tend to pester endlessly over meals with silly and nerdy questions. One such appears in the title of this post; the victims were Alan Barr and Alex Schekochihin.
The answer of ‘yes’ can be justified as follows:
When we speak of the color of an object, it is the visual sensation* correponding to the mixture of frequencies in the light it scatters. This color is not constant, but there is a dominant one determined by an interpolation of usual experience.
From this point of view, it seems sensible to say that air in small quantities is transparent, but in large quantities**, it is blue.
So when a young child asks,
‘Why is the sky blue?,’
a reasonable response is
‘Because air is blue.’
It’s not that the usual answer in terms of Rayleigh scattering is wrong. But this is going into the deeper explanation of why air is blue. On the other hand, the shallower response above corresponds to something like:
Q: Why are leaves green?
A: Because they contain a lot of chlorophyll, which is green.
The Rayleigh scattering and so forth would then be analogous to an explanation of why chlorophyll is green. (I don’t know. Of course there must be a chemical explanation of sorts, but I seem to recall that there is also an interesting evolutionary explanation.) You can go into this later when the child is older.
By the way, ‘air’ here refers to the substance making up the Earth’s atmosphere. Atmospheric colours seen from other bodies in the solar system seem to be quite diverse.
Invoking the classification of different interactions, one might argue that there is a distinction between a process that involves a good deal of absorption-emission (which is the case for most solid objects we see) and one that only has elastic scattering. However, Alan and Alex assure me that these are really no different from a physicist’s view: It’s all scattering.
At the end of the Warden and Tutor’s meeting today, Simon Hooker contributed the interesting remark that liquid oxygen is a very pretty blue, although that is likely to be a different phenomenon from Rayleigh scattering.
Apparently, Philip Larkin was aware of this question and answer:
High Windows (1967)
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
As you know, a poet chooses his words pretty carefully, especially in a short poem. So Larkin must have meant something nontrivial writing the last stanza: ‘blue sky’ would have been the phrase coming more readily to mind.
I think Alan summarized his annoyance quite succinctly:
‘They fuck you up, these mathematicians.’
Well, we don’t mean to…
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* ‘Visual sensation’ here is referring to the fact that color seen by the eye is an equivalence class of light. You may know that the space of colours is three-dimensional, a mere projection of the space of physical light, which is infinite-dimensional. For an intriguing overview of this topic, I recommend the article ‘Geometry in Color Perception’ by A. Ashtekar, A. Corichi and M. Pierri, in: Black Holes, Gravitational Radiation and the University, (Kluwer Dodrecht, 1999), p. 535-549, CGPG pre-print 97/12-7.
** By the way, the fact that colour is an aggregate effect applies to usual objects as well. Gold is rather yellow, but I doubt it would be if we broke it down into molecules. Obviously, how much stuff needs to be present for us to start experiencing colour will depend on the substance.
Bloomsbury Journal 