> why is the sky blue?

> The sky is blue because of something called Rayleigh scattering. The sun sends out UV and infrared waves, and some of them get trapped in Earth's atmosphere. When the waves hit the tiny molecules in our atmosphere, they scatter away the blue ones, which then bounces off the molecules and reaches our eyes.

"filtered to the U.S. elementary-school curriculum", suuure

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tdeck 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are science books written for curious children that explain this kind of thing. I remember reading them.

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TZubiri 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember seeing this as a fun-fact in some high school book.

It's not a 5th grader answer in the sense that most won't remember it perfectly, but it can appear in their school material, no doubt

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simonjgreen 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was definitely taught this in those terms and at that age.

Perhaps the unexpected response comes from its recall ability. It’s not the personality of a child, just the material a child is exposed to.

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ymhr 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn’t that also wrong? From what I remember it’s the blue wavelengths of visible light that are scattered and make us perceive the sky as blue. UV may well be scattered too but we can’t see that, right? Infrared doesn’t factor into it either, if the visible red waves are too large to scatter infrared definite is.

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danaris 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, that's what it's saying: "they scatter away the blue ones, which then bounces off the molecules and reaches our eyes".

	▲	topaz0 26 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's written as if the UV and infrared are scattering the blue, which is not correct. Everything scatters off small particles, but shorter (blue) wavelengths scatter more (as the 6th power of the frequency), so most of the scattered light is blue. The details matter somewhat, i.e if the sun were a bit cooler, there'd be less blue in the incident light to scatter and you'd see something somewhat greener.
	▲	Sharlin 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes, but the thing about UV and IR rays is a red herring.

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Aeolun 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve read random kid science books to my son with this info in. The problem is the AI has perfect recall.

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rzzzt 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Choose your explanation in comics form:

- https://xkcd.com/1145/

- https://www.exocomics.com/743/