Why is the sky blue?
“Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.” ~Carl Sagan
As children, we are constantly asking questions that seem ridiculous to our parents and other adult figures. “Why is the sky blue?” is perhaps the most used example that many people have heard, before rolling their eyes and telling the kid in question: “Because it is. Now hurry along, we have to [insert pressing matter on the itinerary here].”
I was raised this way, as I’m sure many of us were. As a child, I used to ask so many questions that my parents limited me to asking three thoughtful one’s a day; after my three questions were up, I’d have to find the answer myself or wait another day. Time as a kid does not seem so important—it’s only when we become adults that we realize there are many things that need to be accomplished in such an infinitesimally small amount of time. We create schedules, abide by those schedules, and focus intently upon the product of our creation, working diligently to finish our schedules for the day, week, month, year — life.
It comes as a surprise to me, then, that when I now ask why the sky is blue, many people do not know the answer. They do not know that sunlight reaches earth’s atmosphere and is scattered every which way by all the gases and particles in the air. They do not know that the color blue is scattered more than the other colors because it travels as smaller, shorter waves, and that’s why we see it. That childish question: ‘Why is the sky blue?’ stumps even college-educated individuals, successful businessmen/women and adults who never took the time to answer the question. They accepted it as a fact and did not press the matter further. They did not stop to ponder: ‘Well, why is the sky blue?’
Questions are powerful and inquisitive minds will always ask them. Sometimes, the simplest questions can lead to very technical or complicated answers. The prompt for my Whittier Scholars assignment asks what my big question is — something that I’ve always wanted to know. And I suppose there are a great many things that I’d like to know, like how to remove radicals and wonky functions from the denominator from hell, or how to make sure my girlfriend is always happy, or how to graduate without falling $30,ooo into debt, or whether or not the universe is infinite. But at the core of all these questions comes that child-like demeanor I feel I’ve never really outgrown — I ask: ‘why?’
In my opinion, ‘why’ is the greatest of all questions. Why anything? As much as I despise adverbs, ‘why’ is the most powerful word in the english language (and when translated, in any other language). It brings a question and puts it to the greater question: “for what reason or purpose?” Why am I writing this article right now? Because it is an assignment for my class.
Why?
Because my professor wants me to.
Why?
Because it will help improve my writing skills and maybe even my critical thinking. It helps me realize what is important to me.
Why?
Because I separate what I find useful and what I find wasteful—it pushes me to ask a deep and provoking question that I want answered.
Each successive ‘why’ increases the explanation for my reasoning on a particular question. The answer continues to become more precise until it is completely exhausted; I feel that my example could go on much further, but I don’t want to bore readers with the semantics. There are many questions out there in world inside of someone’s head that need to be answered—picking from just one, to me, feels a little… restraining. I do not want to be limited to a singular question, and I most certainly wish to pursue each of my questions until they are whittled down to their very core.
However, there are barriers to pursuing knowledge to its “core”, even in the world of science. During a TedTalk, Freelance Tech and Science Journalist Gemma Milne also wondered why the sky is blue. She wanted to know the true reasoning behind the science, as told from the scientific papers themselves and not through secondary sources or paraphrased links. Using the power of the 21st century, Milne googled her question, looking for the original scientific article. Her search ended with a powerful message: “It’s a sad truth that we have to pay to access 80 percent of all scientific knowledge,” Milne said.
Milne goes further, stating that communication within the scientific community is powerful—but it is not inclusive. Outside of a particular field, the technical jargon of the paper makes it nearly illegible to other users. She argues that allowing access and simplifying the terminology so that the information is both available and readable for everyone is the best course of action.
I have to agree. While science is a very technical field and thus deserves technical phrases to accurately describe an event, there also needs to be a simplification of what is being expressed. In mathematics, the “purest” of all science and the language of physics, we simplify. Why should it be any different when it comes to language?
Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize Winning Physicist and known as the great explainer, developed a technique to help individuals learn pretty much anything. A mental strategy, now dubbed the Feynman technique, takes a technical concept and forces one to simplify. Like Milne, Feynman understood the importance of communication—something the scientific community, for all of its emphasis on the precision of language, fails to understand. A difficult concept should not require even more difficult explanations—it should be the opposite: simplified.
Asking the right questions is important. But it is just as important that when an individual asks the right questions, they are capable of making sense of the answers.
People
Professor Russell
Professor Rehn
Professor Kjellberg
Alfredo Santacruz
