Illusions and Light

immensely talented video crew, I should say. We've been just putting together episodes that are based on experiments out there that kids do and then kind of talking about the ramifications of the you know, physics or the science behind those experiments in our daily lives. And it's been really cool. Yeah. Well, we've put together ten of these puppies in an absurdly short period of time, but we're really excited about the

product because each one is three segments. The first segment is that experiment where we do, like sometimes it's something as simple as a science lab volcano kind of a thing, or rubbing a balloon on your hair making it stick up, which was pretty awesome because that's not something I normally

do to your hair. It's not so In the first segment, we conduct these experiments, and then we do two additional segments where we really get into the stuff to blow your mind kind of territory with these experiments and talk about how the properties that are illustrated in the experiment relate to you and how they relate you to the cosmos.

That's what's really going to be exciting about them is that we kick off with something potentially a little explosive, potentially a little goofy, and then we we try and bring you to that wow moment. And we hope we do this. We hope the kids really like it that they don't throw tomatoes with their iPod screens. But I think you know, if your parent watch them and you can cheat, you can watch it on your own time and then pretend that you knew all this when you

do the experiment with your kid. We don't mind. So we thought we would take some of the elements that we talked about and and bring them to you. Guys thought, well, this is interesting stuff, like you know, what about roinbows and why is the sky blue? And what about the aurora borealis and all the other weird things that happens with light and uh, liquids and refraction. Yeah, I mean, all this information is just gonna drain out out of our brains anyway, So as long as it's up there,

we might as well throw it out a podcast. It is fascinating information because we're dealing with On one level, we live in a world of light. We have our sun beaming all this light to the earth. Light is the means by which we visually sense the world around us. But everything is not quite what it seems. We perceive things in a certain way and then we end up

accepting that that is reality. But there are a number of ways that we can sort of see through the behaviors of light and gain a little more insight exactly what's going on. But before we do that, I want to talk about sunlight itself, because you know, we all take it for granted. It's beaming down gives us a nice sunburn or I don't know, warms up sunburn. Yeah, yeah, warms us up on the cold day. Um okay, yeah, it's not the seventies. It doesn't really give us a

nice sunburn. Hopefully it doesn't. I think that we should talk about the photons and how they emerge from the sun. Right, what we think of light, or it's easy to think of light is instantaneous, you know, you flip in the light switch and then light is there. But sunlight is traveling from the Sun to the Earth. These photons that make up light are traveling through space and they are bombarding us, bouncing off of us. In fact, when they

hit us. It turns out that we know how long it takes for the stream of light to actually hit the Earth. We know this because we know the distance from the Earth to the Sun. We know the speed of light, so it only takes eight minutes and twenty seconds for us to reach us after traveling what ninety million miles or something. But I think it is absolutely fascinating.

So so if you were to turn the sun off, it would be eight minutes before you'd really get the idea that, whoa, the sun is off, because now the light is run out. Yeah, yeah, you'd have a slight delay there, right uh, And it would be terrifying. Who

in the sun off? But here's a really cool thing too, that those photons are actually kicking around in the sun for about me There are different accounts on this, but anywhere from like ten thousand years to you know, twenty thousand years before they get to emerge to the surface of the Sun and then make that eight minute and

twenty second journey. And the reason for that is because when a photon is in the center of the Sun, it's just sort of getting pinball machined around, reabsorbed, emitted, reabsorbed, admitted, reabsorbed admitted. So you know that when that photon gets the surface, it's like, oh, finally, Yeah, it's like it's

in the sun. It's kind of like a like a boxer before match in the back, just kind of like punch in the air, you know, doing a little shadow box and like, let's do this, getting pumped up and then wham, finally, after after this immense amount of time, launched towards the Earth, rips through the atmosphere and then slams into like a little solar power on top of one of those plastic squirrels that you see people put their their lawn that glow and photo that and now

the journey is ended. Yeah, and then they probably talk about all those years I powered the heck out of that squirrel. What where I'm gonna end up squirrel, a sellar squirrel. But anyway, we thought that was kind of cool to share with you guys, and we thought that would help to talk a little bit more about these other what seemed like optical illusions, rainbows and our blue

sky above. Well, let's get into rainbows. A scientist by the name of Kermit T. Frog once the rainbows or visions but only illusions, and rainbows have nothing to hide. Do rainbows really have nothing to hide? That pot of gold I've yet to find it. Well, yes, that's true. And we were discussing earlier if rainbows really did rise from a pot of gold, does that mean there are two pots of gold, two pots of lepricn gold on

the earth at any given time to facilitate rainbow. And if there's only one pot of gold, the rainbow can't have two in here. Here's where I'm gonna shatter that the pot of gold question for you all together. Rainbows actually appear as halos, not these sort of half arcs

that we see. Yeah. Yeah, so if you were to go above the clouds and look down, you would see that rainbow is actually a halo, a circle, a giant one, and when we're here in the ground we look up the horizon, we're only seeing a portion of that because of course we don't have, first of all, the inner machinery to try to perceive that, and sort of the Earth is kind of in our way, blocking our view of that entire halo. You know, occasionally will you'll even

see an inverted rainbow. Were aware of this. I've heard of this. It's crazy, and it's caused by sunlight shining through atmospheric ice crystals. It's rarely encountered. At latitudes far from the Earth's poles, we have these upside down rainbows where the sunlight shines through these tiny ice crystals too high altitude clouds, and it creates this. I guess you think of it as like a smiley face. It's turning the frown at the rainbow upside down. It's beautiful. It is.

Let's talk about this process. This bending of light, or as you have referred to it before, is shattering white light seeing what it's made of. So think of it this way. White light is a lie and and the raindrop or a prism or any kind of prism like device, it takes that white light and it breaks it up. We're breaking it up with with some droplets and turning it into the seven different wavelengths and make it up right. So there are seven components of light and you may

know them as roy g BIV. You probably learned that in school. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. And they all have different wavelengths. So when they've bend, they all kind of behave differently, and you've got red right and violet book ending the colors and rainbow and red is the strongest while violet is just a it's a little bit hazier. Okay. I was that roy g BIV would be a good name for a leprechn too. Yeah. I can see it on his little outfit like his

like his his name tag, like he's a convention. Yeah, I'm sure it's been done. There's also a really great Boards of Canada track called roy g BIV. There. So think about that. You think about that prism. You think about this rain drops up in the sky acting as tiny prisms and refracting that light. And then you know that light bouncing off the side of that rain drop and then further refracting it and reflecting it. And that's why you get this like incredibly cool vision in the sky.

You know what, other skies may have rainbows in our solar system. What if you traveled to Saturn's moon Titan, scientists think you might be able to see a rainbow because it boths both sunlight and water droplets. So it could happen, we can hear. Yeah, yeah, So if you travel to Titan, keep a lookout. Okay, so that gives us some insight into rainbows. When we come back from our break, we're going to ask the question why is the sky blue? And we're back, why is it the

sky blue? I believe it was the magician comedian Night Court star Harry Anderson who answered this question by saying, if the sky were green, we wouldn't know when to stop mowing. That's right, which is a valid commentary on the optical world. But it's it's actually a little more complicated than that. The reason that the sky is blue relates right back to these different wavelengths in light. That's right.

So atoms, molecules and particles and atmosphere absorb and scatter light. Okay, so we're going to talk not specifically like we were with the rainbow, but we're talking about that huge expanse of blue sky above us. And again we're talking about the components of light roy g biv and those different wavelengths that scattered throughout the atmosphere, which means that some are better spotted by our eyes than others, and this

is called Raleigh scattering. Shorter wavelengths like blue and violet actually scatter a lot more than long ones when particles like oxygen and nitrogen molecules are relatively small. Okay, so that's why blue and violet are pretty much dominating the sky for us, because that's what we're perceiving. It's what

scatters throughout that atmosphere. But I mean, you probably are asking the question, if that's the case, then why don't I look up at a sky that's all sort of monet you know, blue and purple splot Why do I get that one color? And it comes down to the limits of our our eyes and the limits of our brain to process all of this information. Yeah, because the cones in our eye seen overlap in these two colors. I mean, it's really again limitations of machinery that we have.

So it's sort of like our eyes are interpreting this information for us. And saying, Okay, this must be this one color blue. And I love this idea that almost within our brain we have a painter mixing these colors, the blue and the purple and white and coming up with this blue sky for us. Yeah, that's kind of simplifying the process. It's like, what do we have coming in, Well, there's a little violet. We're just gonna call it blue, you know, simplify things. We've got enough to worry about.

Since wise we're not about the sky. It's really not doing much for you. Yeah, this brain is taking up a lot of energy as it is. Let's just say blue. And then it's so cool to think that every single day you get a different shade of this this painterly blue, depending on how cloudy is, how much sun there is.

I find it fascinating. I remember always finding like a really blue sky kind of depressing, Like I'm more of a cloud guy, like a like a nice cloudy overcast day, or even if it's I mean, I like sunlight as much of the next guy, and my body needs it. But even then I like, I like a sun with a little clouds mixing it up, but like a really endlessly blue monotonously blue sky is there's something just kind of weighs on you. Okay, here's the weird thing, Robert Lamb,

you wear blue all the time, sky blue. In fact, you're wearing it right now. You don't wear the same blue shirt every day, but you have like ten of that was that verious shell. Yeah, well that's a color that looks good at me, I'm told by my wife. So but but or maybe that's the thing. Maybe I since I wear blue a lot, I'm a little concerned when the sky is dressed the same as me. You're afraid that someone's gonna a bird, is gonna mistake you for this guy, or they just look at that guy.

He's in the sky addressed the same. They're just a couple of twinkies. Alright. So one other quickie for you guys. Northern lights of those are those dazzling Arctic and Antarctic displays, colorful sheets of light transforming the endless winter skies. Right. Yeah.

If you catch any of the Discovery BBC co production Frozen Planet, there's an episode that deals with the northern lights and they use some time laps stuff and just fabulous filmography to capture the Northern lights, so definitely check that out of you for a visual interpretation of what

we're talking about. Yeah, and these actually form when solar particles are thrown out by explosions on the Sun and are drawn by the Earth's magnetic field toward the North and South Poles, colliding with atmospheric gases to emit photons or light particles. And I just found that pretty cool to be recently talked about magnets, magnetic fields North and South Pole and how all of this sort of helps us to not be bombarded by all of the Sun's

solar junk. But it's very cool to know that it's also part of this again, paint release guy in some climes of the world. What is kind of sad about the Northern lights is that my family, when I was younger, we lived in Canada for a little bit. I think

I mentioned before. We my dad was a dentist up in Newfoundland, Canada, so it's pretty far north, and I know on at least one occasion, like we went out and made a special trip to glimpse the Northern lights and supposedly we saw them, but it didn't really make I was like in kindergarten at the time, and it didn't make a real impression on me, and I don't really have a firm memory of what they may have

looked like. So I've always done that kind of sad because people are like, oh, did you get to see the Northern Lights? Like, yeah, I did, And what do you think I didn't make an impression. I think you need to implant a memory there well, to a certain extent, I do you know, And this of course we've done all podcasts about memory. But but then I your stories

about us going to see the Northern Lights. So I create this vision of my family standing there, and then I see these brilliant time laps videos of the Northern Lights, so I kind of throw that in there, and then I throw this vision of me justlike standing around day dreaming, looking at the ground instead of looking up at the

brilliance in the heavens. Again, that's the thing that I find fascinating, is this idea that our brain is interpreting the information that we see and it's not really the reality always, right, You've got memory, and then you just have the limitations of what we've been given or what we have evolved with. And so yeah, I mean this guy isn't necessarily blue. There's another quick rainbow. In fact, the Babylonian goddess Ishtar wears rainbows is kind of a

fancy necklace and there's a light off. Yeah, and there's a delightful rainbow bridge that connects the Norse realms of Vascard and mid Guard, which I think they do something with that in the Thor comic books in the Thor movie as well. You have to take down some of that masculine energy there. What a rainbows about? That's what we ride our horses over when we trawl up into war, trall up into war. I don't know what I'm saying anymore. Uh, well, you know what. That's what happens when you do you

tend videos back to back. Okay, this is some of the stuff that we learned, and we may continue to bring some other items that we covered as well to you guys, but have a lookout for these videos. Also wanted to mention that Matt Frederick, our producer here, created the music for that and it's really cool indeed, so Keeop a look out for those. We'll throw some links stuff on the Facebook and the Twitter for sure, so that you can view these and show them to your

kids yourself. Let's call the robot over give us some of that sweet listener mail. Here's one from Madeline. Madeline rights and says, Hey, Robert and Julie. Just thought I would say thanks for all the great podcast I've been listening to them and really enjoying them for a while now, and I thought it should finally take the time to say thanks. I think you guys pick great topics, always very interesting and fun. You two can also be quite funny.

You made me laugh a lot. I like the random bits of personal stories and et cetera that sometimes are in your podcast. To you both seem very cool. I'm a sixteen year old girl from Michigan. Hey, that's uh your homestake. I found your podcast on the Zoom marketplace a long time ago and have been enjoying them ever since. I liked you guys on Facebook. Just now, oh there he goes, Just watch the register. Um. I love your photos. It's funny to see the faces of people I've been

listening to for months. You both look great this. I hope you guys keep up with great work. I learned a lot of interesting stuff listening to your podcast. I'm often thinking about it in the boring moments of school for days after. Thanks a lot, Matline, very cool, Thanks

for listening, Melan. I do think that's interesting that, you know, we have so many younger listeners and they all sort of make that similar statement of you know, it kind of helps enrich my my life as I'm sitting in school and we just did a podcast on sloth and talked about daydreaming. So if we can help your daydreams

and make them better than that's awesome. Yeah, indeed, So if you want to reach out to us, you want to connect with us, you can certainly find us on Facebook where we are stuff to Blow your Mind, and you can also find us on Twitter where we are blow the Mind. And you can also drop us a line and blow the mind. At Discovery dot com, be sure to ck out our new video podcasts, Stuff from the Future. Join how staf Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.