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The sky isn’t blue. It’s transparent. That’s why you can see stars that aren’t blue at night. When struck by sunlight at the right angles it appears blue, but s
by yawpitch 9mo ago
The sky isn’t blue. It’s transparent. That’s why you can see stars that aren’t blue at night. When struck by sunlight at the right angles it appears blue, but saying it is blue is like saying the ocean is green when a bucket of it clearly isn’t.
- jxdxbx 9mo agoIf something appears blue, it is blue. That’s all color is. Also, if you took a sufficiently large quantity of air and put it into empty space and shined very bright white through it, it would experience rayleigh scattering—-meaning that air, when you have enough of it and shine a bright enough light through it, is blue.
- yawpitch 9mo agoBy that logic the sky is near-Planck length ultraviolet, because if I put a sufficiently large quantity of it immediately beside a supernova it goes way past blue. Color is a property something has under certain conditions, it is not a property of what that something is under all conditions.
- mncharity 9mo agoPerhaps "transparent with a blue tint"?
- yawpitch 9mo agoI’ll allow “transparent with an occasional blue tint under the current conditions of its nearest star”.
- mncharity 8mo agoDoes that confuse sales staff when shopping for clothes? ... :) The general observation being that sometimes educational descriptions of things get hedges which wouldn't usually be applied in everyday life. Yes, the nice red shirt will look black under some lighting, like some meters underwater... but it usually isn't mentioned. Yet for example, colors of unfamiliar objects in education content can get an "appears" hedge -"it appears white", rather than the more usual, simpler concept of "if its light looks white, it's 'white'".