Why is the sky blue?

Why is the sky blue?
Answer by Jon Bain, Philosopher & Poet
Answer: Because the Sun is Gold.
At night the sky has no colour, nor has the ocean. Both these colorless substances reflect a shadow, the opposite of the colour of the light they are in.

Blue is the complimentary opposite of Gold.

If the sun went a shade more orange, and then red, so the sky would turn more turquoise, then green. Also, if the Sun were to turn blue, then the sky would go gold. If the Sun went a more lemon yellow, the sky would turn a beautiful shade of purple-azure.

Of course the light is scattered at sunsets through clouds and dust in obscure ways reflecting, a variety of colours.

This answer had been sitting in my mind for a few years, and when speculating on what it would be like living on planets around other suns, the answer suddenly seemed obvious.

If you look at red light, it casts a green shadow. The ocean becomes gray and colorless in overcast conditions, but goes the brightest blue on the brightest days. As the sun's light picks up dust particles and goes orange, so the sea can go almost green.

I also work with cyber-art, which uses math formulae to build images, and I have noticed that colours often form opposing pairs, like this :

blue / gold
cyan / red
green / purple
orange / turquoise

The most interesting images nearly always seem to be blue and gold. Our eyes are perhaps able to see a wider spectrum of colours in this range.

When refracted around a sin curve, as the graph value of -1 produces a range of azure colors, so the value +1 produces a range of saffron colours.

Here are some samples:
www.2010-south-africa.org/cyber-art.htm
blue-gold fractal radiance

Fraxellation Eagle series of cyber-art @
www.software-multimedia.com

vís veritas
Jon Bain
2005, September 28
www.poseidons.net
Sunrise in the Rigel system.
Under a blue sun swims a golden sea

But, (said the shadow), why then are clouds white, & why is the foam of the sea also white?
For the same reason (sang the muse), that galaxies & stars are white from far, but blue & red from close:

Because the light disperses and gets mixed up in complex reflections, and thus it loses its distinct hues.

Many of my cyber-art images, have to be shaded down away from the natural 'white noise' which things tend towards, when the complexity becomes too rich for visible texture. The refraction process has to be carefully hued with subtle fractions in order not to end up as visible white noise.

Take a clear ice-cube, and crush it into white snow...

The scrambled mix of breaking waves & moisture of clouds, dilutes the hues of blue & gold we sometimes see.
Rayleigh Scattering: Not the answer
What conditions must be met, according to this theory, for the sky to be some other color than blue?

Rayleigh scattering cannot answer this, because it is not a scientific principle that uses any mathematical model, formula, or any measurement of wavelength in a calculation.

If the sky reflected the shorter wavelengths then it would be violet in colour. Not blue.

Also the sky is bluest on clear days, when there is less atmosphere to reflect. A paradox that can only be explained by the light NOT reflecting off the sky in the usual sense. It must have the OPPOSITE condition of obtaining its colour: IE shadow.

Furthermore if the sun refracted off the sky, then the angle of incidence of the sunlight would then cause the hue to be graded at differing colours. As the sky is one hue (variously saturated), its colour cannot be derived from refraction in the normal rainbow sense.
Update: 7 January, 2006
Now consider the star Zuben Eschemali. Reputedly it is the only star that is green by observation, but it appears white. I would then suggest that true white stars do not exist. Instead they would be green, but due to the interference in light over such long distances, all stars eventually appear white. But blue and red, being on the out edges of the spectrum, are able to retain their color more easily.

Many stars are technically lemon, or turquoise in colour, as well as various hues of green. Though they appear white.

Ever noticed how green light is always less bright than any other color light?

Consider this star colour table:
from ( http://domeofthesky.com/clicks/bv.html )

Color Index Spectral Type Approximate Color
1.41 M0 Red
0.82 K0 Orange
0.59 G0 Yellow
0.31 F0 Yellowish
0.00 A0 White
-0.29 B0 Blue

Consider a normal spectrum:
red, orange, yellow, (yellowish), green, blue.

Seems obvious in retrospect.
Newton's laws are true in all parts of the Universe, they have no exception on other stars.
Critique of 'Dipole scattering' - 3 December 2007
world.std.com/~mmcirvin/bluesky
- Matt McIrvin's arguments are in italics, in pale yellow.

'Since sunlight appears white but the sky is a robin's-egg blue, it must be that the scattered light excites our blue-sensing cones more, and our red-sensing cones less, than the original sunlight.'

A photograph does not have cones or rods, the color of the sky does not change on film, thus: 'Why the sky is blue' has nothing to do with our eyes at all.

'But the news about the charge only travels at the speed of light! '

Incorrect the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen experiment proves this is a piece of scientific archeology. bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~suchii/Bohr/EPR ' In 1935, the paper by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen appeared in the Physical Review 47, and this came as 'a bolt from the blue'
members.shaw.ca/quadibloc/science/eprint
In 1976, two physicists, Edward Fry and Randall Thompson, startled the scientific community by performing an experiment that might seem to imply that, under some conditions, subatomic particles can communicate with each other at speeds greater than that of light.

Another misconception:
'the shorter a wave is, the faster it varies in space; and the higher its frequency is, the faster it varies in time.'

Light travels at the speed of light. It's movement in space and time is constant. This is one of the few fundamental constants of the Universe, and it was discovered by Einstein, many years after Lord Rayleigh's theory was postulated. Rayleigh scattering is 19th century scientific archeology: Obsolete.

The wave-like nature of light is a mathematical pattern based on the sin curve. Just because it follows a similar pattern to water waves, does not mean it actually goes up and down. It travels in a straight line, the frequency graph is a mathematical measurement that can in no way represent its movement in space, or time.

The amplitude of the graph is a measure of intensity. IE the amount of photons moving in a perfectly straight line. If you believe that the wave shape of the graph is actually the wave moving up and down, then why not left and right? The amplitude is a single dimension, not a movement in space.

And still the possibility of a straight-line-graph argument emanating from one of the 'scattered', eludes us, as does anything like an example like my light bulb example. But the crux of it all is this gem : 'sunlight appears white'.

I love Africa.

Perhaps you need to get some sun on your frost bitten face? Boston must be so miserably freezing. I wager he last saw the sun back in the 20th century, or perhaps the 19th century when Lord Rayleigh's theory was predominant.

Why o why is the sun classified as a type 'G' star? Also known as an 'Orange Dwarf'?

The Zulus have a great phrase for moments like this. It goes : 'Awulethu umshini wam'
answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=2
Critique, 4 December 2007.
'But violet light has the shortest wavelength so why is’nt the sky violet? Well it’s true that the violet light is scattered more than the blue light, but our eyes aren’t so good at picking up violet light. This means we see the sky as being blue even though there is some violet light there too.' -from answers.google ->

And every camera in the world is perhaps likewise not so good at picking up violet light, or what?

Does it not occur to the writer, that the frequency of the light cannot be affected by our eyes?
Here is a summary of this logic :
Why is the sky blue? 6/Dec/2007
Now consider:
The Invisibility machine
has rendered nuclear weapons,
virtually redundant.

and

A flying machine invented in 2005 AD
Have you seen this yet?

 

King of the Surf
This page has been summarized here : Why is the sky blue?
Why is the sea blue? : The latest Revelation : 20 January 2008