Science Comedian

Once, when I was maybe ten years old, I asked my dad, “Why is the sky blue?”

A pretty rea­son­able ques­tion for a lit­tle ten-year-old sci­en­tist. But he wasn’t in the mood.

He said, “Go ask your mother.”

And I thought: Great, she knows.

I turned from my dad, and headed toward the kitchen, know­ing I was one step closer to hav­ing my answer.

And as I rounded the cor­ner, I was expe­ri­enc­ing the thrill of the Sci­en­tific Method. I was fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of Galileo and Isaac Newton.

And, to a cer­tain degree, I was cor­rect. I was, indeed, one step closer to my answer. Not the answer, but an answer.

There she stood. I took a deep breath, and asked her, “Mom, why is the sky blue?”

And I’ll never for­get her response:

“Because I said so.”

At first, I was in awe of my mother. Later, I learned not to trust her in mat­ters of science.

(The real rea­son the sky is blue has to do with light scat­ter­ing by oxy­gen and nitro­gen mol­e­cules. The Usenet Physics FAQ of UC River­side has a good expla­na­tion – includ­ing the role Albert Ein­stein played in prov­ing it was the air mol­e­cules them­selves that were respon­si­ble and not par­ti­cles of dust or droplets of water vapor sus­pended in the air)