Month: December 1969

Why can water appear brown, blue (as in the ocean), and clear (as in a glass of water)?

Brown water contains colored contaminants that provide the color. Brown is the typical end result for a random mixture of pigments. The blue ocean is caused mostly by the sky. Since the ocean reflects some of the light from the sky, it appears blue. Pure water is almost completely colorless. Thus a glass of water has no color (unless you illuminate it with colored light). But if you look at a white light through many meters of water, that light will become slightly colored. Water absorbs a very small amount of visible light and you will see only what is not absorbed. I’m not sure what color pure water has. It may appear slightly green.

Why are there sunspots?

The sun is a ball of incandescent gas. That gas moves about, flowing up and down as well as across the sun’s surface. This movement keeps the sun’s temperature roughly uniform but there are occasionally imperfections; regions of the sun’s surface that get out of balance with the rest of the sun. When you cook a thick soup on the stove, there will also be regions of the surface that are cooler than others.

Why are tanning beds not good for you; also there are some new ones recently that claim that they are safer than others (have no B rays)? Are they about the same as the sun itself or how much worse for you?

Tanning beds emit ultraviolet light in order to trigger your skin’s tanning response. This ultraviolet light can and does cause chemical damage to your skin. Like all light, ultraviolet light is absorbed and emitted as particles. The energy in each light particle depends on its wavelength and, since ultraviolet light has short wavelengths, ultraviolet light particles carry lots of energy. They carry enough energy to rearrange the molecules that absorb them. If those molecules are part of the genetic information of a cell, the cell may die or, worse yet, may become cancerous. The shorter the wavelength of the ultraviolet light, the more energetic its particles and the more damage it can do. Tanning beds walk a narrow line between inducing tanning and causing significant damage. Leather skin is one end result of too much chemical damage. Tanning beds that emit relatively long wavelength ultraviolet are probably less harmful than those that emit shorter wavelength ultraviolet (these wavelength ranges are sometimes designated by letters A, B, and C…I think that A is the longest wavelength and least harmful). Still, you skin’s tanning response is a defense against chemical damage and is probably not worth trying to trigger with light. Recent research seems to have found chemicals that trigger tanning. These chemicals mimic light-damaged molecules in your skin. Your skin senses these molecules and responds by tanning. If these chemicals work, you’ll soon be able to develop a true tan without exposure to light.

When I look up at the sky on a clear day, there is the sun, then a surrounding circle of white-blue light covering maybe half the sky, encircled by deep blue down to the horizon, followed by a white layer at the horizon itself. Please explain these zones.

The ring that you see surrounding the sun is probably the 22° halo caused by refraction from ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. These tiny ice crystals are hexagonal prisms and they deflect the light that passes through them to form a ring of light around the sun. Because the particles are large enough to bend all the colors of light equally, the ring appears white—or blue-white when superimposed on the blue sky. The deep blue of the surrounding sky is caused by Rayleigh scattering of the sunlight passing through it. In this process, small groups of air molecules and tiny dust particles deflect sunlight toward your eye. Since they deflect short wavelength light (blue light) more effectively than long wavelength light (red light), they give the sky a bluish glow. Finally, the white appearance of the horizon is probably light scattered toward your eyes by surface haze. Relatively large particles in the air scatter sunlight in all directions so that you see a white glow from the air near the ground.

A wonderful reference for some of these ideas is “Rainbows, Halos, and Glories” by Robert Greenler.

What makes the clouds white – or having colors at sunset and why is the sky gray on a cloudy day?

The water droplets in clouds are quite large; large enough to be good antennas for all colors of light. As light passes by those droplets, some of it scatters (is absorbed by the antenna/water droplets and is reemitted by the antenna/water droplets). Since there is no color preference in this scattering from large droplets, the scattered light has the same color as the light that illuminated the cloud. In the daytime, the sunlight is white so the clouds appear white. But at sunrise or sunset, the sun’s light is mostly red (the blue light has been scattered away by the atmosphere before it reached the clouds) so the clouds appear red, too. If the clouds are very thick, they may absorb enough light (or scatter enough upward into space) to appear gray rather than white. Another way to see why the clouds are white is to realized that light reflects from every surface of the water droplets. As the light works its way through the random maze of droplets, it reflects here and there and eventually finds itself traveling in millions of random directions. When you look at a cloud, you see light coming toward you from countless droplets, traveling in countless different directions. You interpret this type of light, having the sun’s spectrum of wavelengths but coming uniformly from a broad swath of space, as being white. These two views of how light travels in a cloud (absorption and reemission from droplets or reflections from droplet surfaces) turn out to be exactly equivalent to one another. They are not different physical phenomena, but rather two different ways to describe the same physical phenomena.

What is Brewster’s angle?

When light reflects from a horizontal surface at an angle, the reflected light tends to be polarized horizontally. At a specific angle, Brewster’s angle, the light is completely horizontally polarized because any vertically polarized light that hits the surface at this angle is allowed to enter the surface without reflection. Since reflections from horizontal surfaces are mostly horizontally polarized, glare is mostly horizontally polarized. Polarizing sunglasses deliberately block horizontally polarized light to reduce glare.

What is black light and how does it work?

Black light is ultraviolet light. You cannot see it so a room illuminated only by ultraviolet light appears dark or “black”. However any fluorescent materials in the room (e.g. brighteners in your clothes) will absorb the ultraviolet light and reemit it as visible light. That is why things with fluorescent pigments on them glow when illuminate by black light.

What color is the sun as viewed from outside our atmosphere?

The sun appears bluer when viewed from outside our atmosphere. The earth’s atmosphere scatters a substantial fraction of the violet and ultraviolet light in sunlight, leaving a reddened sun disk to our view. Without that scattering, the sun’s disk will appear to contain more blue and ultraviolet light.

What causes the colors in the aurora borealis?

These colors come from the atomic fluorescence of particles high above the earth’s surface. As charged particles from the sun’s “solar wind” spiral through the earth’s magnetic field toward its poles, they collide with one another and with atoms in the earth’s upper atmosphere. The energy of such collisions can excite the atoms involved and cause them to emit light.

What causes a magnifying glass within a ray of sun to burn such a small, specific spot? Is it the shape of the glass?

The magnifying glass is a lens, a carefully shaped piece of glass that can refract sunlight to create an image. When you burn wood with a magnifying glass, you are creating an image of the sun on the wood. This tiny image, a circle that looks just like the sun itself, only much smaller, is so bright and contains so much thermal radiation that it overheats the wood that it strikes and causes that wood to burn.