ANST - Why?

[Dennis Grace]

Salut COzyns,

Lyonel aisai.

Pug says:

>I have more questions!!!
>
>Why is the sky blue?

Well, I don't know what this has to do with the SCA (they had skies in 
the Middle Ages!), but here goes.  The sky is blue because the gasses in 
Earth's atmosphere don't block the higher energy wavelengths of light as 
easily as well as they block the red-thru-green light.  Since the blue 
component of that light is more prominent than the violet component, we 
see only blue.  Oddly, once you get past UV, you reach a range of 
electromagnetic energy misleadingly named "vacuum ultraviolet" (VUV).  
Oxygen is almost entirely opaque to VUV, so none of it reaches the 
Earth's surface.  I don't know the mechanism of this opacity, but it 
probably relates to the energy level of outer valence electrons in 
oxygen atoms.  

>Why is the grass green? (Well the non-dead parts anyway.)

The grass is green because chlorophyll, the agent of photosynthesis in 
self-sufficient plants, uses red/orange light as an energy source to 
enable processing CO2 and water into simple sugars. Thus the unused 
portion of the reflected white light (from the sun) is shed as 
yellow-green-blue-violet.  As I noted previously, the visible violet 
component is fairly small, and the remaining colors combine to form 
green.

lo vostre por vos servir
Sir Lyonel Oliver Grace


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