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Posted by udit99 15 hours ago

Why is the sky blue?(explainers.blog)
469 points | 173 commentspage 6
deafpolygon 12 hours ago|
Very well explained. I love the in-depthness of the article.
alejohausner 13 hours ago||
Air is mostly nitrogen. Nitrogen gas is blue.

There.

pbhjpbhj 12 hours ago||
Go watch a video of nitrogen gas evaporating from liquid nitrogen ... tell me what colour you see?
mjanx123 12 hours ago||
Oxygen is blue actually. That only contributes to the sky blueness a little tho.
RupertSalt 14 hours ago||
Obligatory xkcd: "Sky Color" https://m.xkcd.com/1145/

Obligatory xkcd[2]: "Rayleigh Scattering" https://m.xkcd.com/1818/

Others?

extraduder_ire 3 hours ago||
Surprisingly, neither TFA or anyone in the comments linked to a photo of liquid oxygen. It's very obviously blue.

The liquid air article on wikipedia doesn't have any photos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_oxygen

margalabargala 14 hours ago||
The "Rayleigh Scattering" comic is really spot on.

Air is blue. The reason air is blue is blah blah blah physics, see the article we're all commenting on, but at the end of the day air is blue. We don't demand the same elaborate physics questions for why a ripe banana peel is yellow.

lovecg 11 hours ago|||
Though is some cases it is a very interesting question, like why gold and copper the color they are instead of being boring and silvery like all the other metals?
extraduder_ire 3 hours ago||
The transition metals are colourful because their outer shell of electrons (d-block) are about visible-light sized.

Looking at a periodic table makes this pattern kinda clear.

zokier 14 hours ago||||
Not really. If the explanation was "air is blue" then the naive expectation would be that sun would appear blue against blackish background, basically the image of sun is being filtered through the atmosphere; if sun is white and air is blue then white filtered through blue should be blue? But sun appears yellowish against blue background. So clearly something different is going on.
gh5000 9 hours ago|||
But a banana is yellow for a very different reason (and a much easier to explain reason) than why the sky is blue. And air isn’t blue, because it’s red at the end of the day?
hgomersall 31 minutes ago||
Why is a banana yellow?
fatih-erikli-cg 4 hours ago||
[dead]
minneapoliced 7 hours ago||
[flagged]
FrogWizardMan 12 hours ago||
to piss me off, goddammit
dave_sid 15 hours ago||
It’s not. It’s raining here.
dave_sid 14 hours ago|
[flagged]
Sharlin 14 hours ago|||
HN is in fact quite receptive to humorous comments. The bar on what's considered humorous is just higher than on Reddit. It's about the signal/noise ratio.
dave_sid 6 hours ago||
I’ll keep a close eye out for it.
nh23423fefe 13 hours ago|||
complaining in a self reply makes me downvote more
dave_sid 6 hours ago||
You’re hard. Seriously hard.
nemo1618 14 hours ago|
Let's be real. The sky is blue because God thought it was a pretty color, simple as. All this stuff about wavelengths and resonant frequencies and human color perception got retconned into the physics engine at some point in the past millennium, that's why all these epicycles are needed.
IceCoffe 14 hours ago||
Our lord Zeus always thinks of everything
dekhn 13 hours ago||
His noodly appendage touches all.
adolph 14 hours ago||
> thought it was a pretty color

So was blue intrinsically pretty and thus made into the sky, or considered pretty and thus imprinted in the minds of humans that way?