“But why mom?”

I used to drive my mom insane with this question when I was a young kid.

“Why’s the sky blue?”

That was my favorite question to repeat, never really satisfied with whatever answer she would muster at the time. This was the early 90s before the availability of internet search engines so I don’t hold it against her for usually making something up on the spot. In reality, the most complete answer to that question is fairly complex for such a simple question, one not easily explained to some adults (especially the moronic bloggers I call friends), let alone a child barely tying his own shoes. Always hanging around in my little 4 year old brain, I only ever spoke up to inquire about what I saw around me. I became obsessed with asking “Why?” anywhere and anytime, in fact, almost everywhere and at all times. (I usually pushed my mom to the limits of her sanity but who didn’t? Sorry Ma.) I’ve come to realize as of late, that my sense of wonder, that inquisitive mind I once had as a child had changed into a desire to understand how things worked, eventually leading me to a career in engineering. This is unlike my sense of humor which remains to this day at a 4 year old level.

But I digress. I’m hoping this will be the first of a series of weekly or semi-weekly posts on topics in the physical sciences, particle, astro, theoretical, etc (mostly for my own personal edification and to flaunt my recently acquired knowledge dick to the village idiots) and I wanted to start with something simple to get you thinking how I do. Maybe intellectualisize this bitch a little bit. I’ll try to simplify what I can, I know some of you just barely graduated from a State college. Don’t worry we’ll just ease it into you nice and gentle at first, like Shitballs and the Commish the first time they rearranged each other’s guts.

Alright here we go. Particle Physics for My Idiot Friends Lesson 1: “Why is the sky blue?”

To answer this, the first thing you need to know about is light. We all think we know what light is right? Just like we all think we know how to please a woman, ahem… Light is, at its simplest, a particle (photon) moving at its speed through the electromagnetic field from a source to a destination. It can also behave as a wave and it experiences no time whatsoever, but that’s another topic for an advanced lesson. Light can have a broad range of energy, we call this the electromagnetic spectrum. It ranges from gamma rays (highest energy) to microwave and radio (lowest energy). You might also know these as “frequencies”. (Fun Fact: the radio in your car, your WiFi, and cell phone all use different frequencies of light in this spectrum to communicate, somewhere in the radio band.) Yep, all of your fat ass porn fetishes are delivered via fat ass light waves. Our eyeballs have evolved to perceive a fairly narrow section of frequencies right around the middle of the spectrum, usually Violet on the high side and Red on the low side.

The Sun in its immense prowess fuses hydrogen atoms into helium in its core releasing energy as photons of many frequencies. These photons can take millions of years to finally reach the surface of the sun after banging around all of the other particles inside, like we all hope JohnDenver’s mom will someday do with all of us. Once at the surface it takes around 8 minutes to arrive at the Earth’s atmosphere, traveling in exactly a straight line until it’s reflected, absorbed or scattered. Luckily for us, most of the light dispatched to us has energy levels that are harmless. Gamma rays of that volume would easily sterilize the Earth. Combining all of these different frequencies, the light that arrives at the atmosphere is unequivocally white, similar to the skin of my ass and equally as blinding. Now, when this light hits the Earth some of it is scattered in all directions by the molecules of gas in the upper atmosphere. Because blue light has the shortest frequency in our visible spectrum it becomes scattered the most and is thus what we see when we look up to the sky. “Buh buh but you said Violet has the highest visible frequency?” Indeed, and Violet is scattered in equal parts to the blue, but something in the human eye can’t distinguish the light combination of blue and violet from blue and white. I don’t know the specifics, go ask one of the Bio nerds.. Dr.Karatesucks or Toothless might know.

And there you have it. You learned something today. With the birth of the internet, a vast untapped resource has become available to us, instantaneously at our fingertips. For the first time in history we have access to the entire collection of human knowledge gathered over milenia, able to be searched, sorted and displayed in an instant. I might be wrong, but I see huge numbers of young people use it for not much more than Youtube and asses on Instagram. (I won’t go into Tide Pods and cinnamon challenges because honestly I think the gene pool could use a little thinning.) This isn’t a new idea by any means but I hope it emphasizes today’s point. If you take nothing else from this I hope I have convinced you to start wondering about the world, asking “Why?” and to continue reading my bullshit ramblings. Peace newbs.

-SPACE GHOST COAST TO COAST