5 ms·
Or perhaps the best way of answering questions from five year olds isn’t causing these people who know about spectra and wavelength-response to go into pedantic
by misnome 6y ago
Or perhaps the best way of answering questions from five year olds isn’t causing these people who know about spectra and wavelength-response to go into pedantic and excessive detail?
If you answer “white” then the next question is “why does it look yellow”. This article seems to presuppose that there is a “correct” way to answer a five-year-old that will prevent further questions.
- fortran77 6y agoIt would be a great time to get a little glass prism and show him that it really has a lot of colors in it!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zoomablemind 6y agoBack in the age, seeing the color spectrum rolled out by the prism made me conclude that it's the prism that colored it... As odd, as it may seem, the presence of the object stole the attention away from the subject. Only later, learning about wave refraction/reflection on the media border has finally elucidated, so to speak, the priciple and placed the origin to the property of the sunlight. It could've been summarized as "I believe in Prizm" :)
- gowld 6y agoIt looks yellow? Don't look at the sun.
- DonHopkins 6y agoDon't say that!!! Do you want to make 5-year-olds look at the sun??! Because saying that is how you make 5-year-olds look at the sun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0I4f8PasIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0I4f8PasIU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BEANS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BEANS
- dllthomas 6y ago> 9:13, Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six I did.
- lordgrenville 6y agoA bit embarrassed to ask this, but could someone ELI5 - why does it look yellow? Or rather, why is this a common perception? Why is this the colour kids reach for to draw the sun?
- AprilArcus 6y agoSunlight shifts reddish as the sun sets and its blue light is Raleigh-scattered away by a thicker slice of atmosphere. This also makes it dim enough to look at directly. At its zenith, when the sun is whitest, it can't be naked eye observed, so the balance of subjective impressions is formed by late-day observations when its color is shifted toward yellow/orange/red.
- fallingfrog 6y agoVery fancy way of saying “because people only look at it at sunset”.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- LegitShady 6y agoGreen Blue and violet wavelengths scattered by the atmosphere
- lathiat 6y agoSee here: https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/what-color-sun https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/what-color-sun
- recursivecaveat 6y agoWell all the other children and past children have drawn it yellow, so it is a part of the culture of children's drawings. The culture really does matter, for example young children in different cultures draw human figures quite differently. As someone else noted in these comments, you can't draw white on white paper well, and yellow is the closest thing really in a box of crayons, so that probably has a large effect as well.
- BurningFrog 6y agoMy guess is that since the sun is too bright to look directly at, the yellowness is some effect from overloading the eyes and/or looking at it peripherally.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoGood guess. Near as I can tell, the sun's yellower at sunrise / sunset, and I can almost look at it during that time, so I imagine that selection bias is involved.
- aaron695 6y ago> then the next question is “why does it look yellow” Then you say it doesn't look yellow at all, outside of sunsets. You just think it does because that's what you have been taught to crayon at school. In the normal sky it's white. In Japan they get taught to color it red, so kids there think the sun is always red.