Editorial Review:
Why is the sky blue? Parents don't know what to say when their children ask. Why the Sky Is Blue answers this ancient and surprisingly complex question in a more entertaining and accessible way than ever before. Götz Hoeppe takes the reader on a historical and scientific journey to show the various ways people in different times and places have explained why the sky looks blue. The richly illustrated story begins with ancient myths and philosophy and ends with the cutting-edge science of optics, statistical physics, and ozone depletion. Most importantly, it is the story of how scientists discovered that the sky's blue depends on life on Earth and the makeup of our planet's ozone layer. Without microbial life's impact on the composition of the atmosphere, the clear daytime sky would probably lack its distinctive color. And without the ozone, the twilight sky's color would also be very different--not the sapphire tone of l'heure bleue, but rather a yellowish or greenish hue. Why the Sky Is Blue shows that skylight can be viewed from a surprising variety of vantage points. We learn how our physiology and cognitive capacities govern our perception of the sky's color. And we discover why this everyday experience has been such a source of fascination and controversy over the centuries. Delightful and intriguing, Why the Sky Is Blue shows how the attempt to answer this age-old and deceptively simple question only enhances the magic of the blue sky we see above us.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
The Blue Sky is no longer cloudy!  2007-12-16
If you have any penchant for physics and enjoy the human adventure that goes with it, then you will enjoy this book, perhaps as much as I have. The author takes us back in time, and places us in the minds of those early Greeks who could only speculate as to the cause behind the beautiful blue in the sky. It is remarkable just how far and to what great heights, literally, mankind has tried to tackle this topic. Hoeppe carries the reader along this marvelous adventure, and does so with a cogent style that makes even the more complicated points easy to grasp.
Many other related subjects are addressed throughout the book that are handled in-depth and give us a view we are unlikely to find elsewhere. John W. Strutt's, Lord Rayleigh, original mechanical treatment for scattering is nicely explained, followed by a close look at his modern electromagnetic modification to it once Maxwell revealed light is an electromagnetic wave.
I especially enjoyed learning of the Chappuis Effect - it might explain the purple color of our Moon during a lunar eclipse when volcanic activity has altered our atmosphere.
With over 250 exoplanets discovered, and thousands more to come, this book will help us understand what we may someday behold when we actually obtain visible images of them. It already helps us understand what we see for the atmospheres of our neighboring planets. For instance, why the Martian sky is not blue and why the cloudless regions on Saturn are a rich sky blue color.
An adult's answer to a child's question  2007-07-16
This book could as easily have been titled "Is the Sky Blue?" And the answer to that is yes and no.
Gotz Hoeppe, a German science journalist, points out that the sky near the horizon, if clear, is whitish not blue.
So when a child asks her father, "Daddy, why is the sky blue?" one answer could be: Take a closer look.
A longer, yet still incomplete, answer would be: Light from the sun hits viruses and molecules of gas in the atmosphere and is reflected as blue light. The sky itself -- mostly nitrogen and oxygen -- is colorless.
Figuring this out took a long time. The Greeks about 2,500 years ago were the first to become dissatisfied with mythical answers, but although they put a lot of effort into proposing reasons, they did not know how to test them.
Hoeppe traces the thinking of prescientific physicists through 2,000 years before getting to the period when real answers started to be found.
"Why is the sky blue?" is a childish question but answering it was not child's play. The first clues began to be teased out 400 years ago, and the big breakthrough came with Isaac Newton's experiments showing that white light is composed of colors, including, of course, sky blue. Newton published "Opticks" in 1704.
Some of his ideas were wrong, which began to be recognized about 50 years later. It took another hundred years to straighten most things out, but another 50 after that for Albert Einstein (and others) to explain the weird qualities of light.
One of the interesting things about "Why the Sky is Blue" is that as a German, Hoeppe spreads credit for the development of physics farther east than most popular scientific histories in English do.
He also presents a number of phenomena that readers can try out in their backyards.
For example, the "blue hour." When the sun goes down, the sky stays blue for a while. The hue is almost, but not quite, the same in the blue hour as during bright daylight, but the mechanism for producing it is entirely unrelated.
A careful look at the sky, with Hoeppe's guidance, will reveal a number of other curiosities that we tend to overlook.
Unfortunately, Hoeppe's guidance goes awry in his summation, when he raises the alarm about what increased carbon dioxide is likely to mean for the blue sky.
The answer, very likely, is nothing, thanks to clouds and other buffering effects, but -- astonishingly -- Hoeppe manages to write about greenhouse gases for two chapters without mentioning the most important one -- water vapor.
It wouldn't hurt to skip Chapter 10.
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