Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #295978 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Already a bestseller in Germany, this book examines the enigma of the blue sky, a phenomenon pursued from Aristotle to medieval Arab philosophers to Renaissance thinkers and present-day planetologists. Hoeppe's range is encyclopedic, covering Greek cosmology, Da Vinci's groundbreaking exploration of color, Newton's discovery of the visible light spectrum and the consequent optics revolution, Huygens subsequent suggestion that light is transmitted as waves, and even poet Goethe's experimental attempts to explain the nature of the color blue. The history that Hoeppe recounts is so rich in ideas and personalities (such as the mountaineering scientist, Tyndall, who discovered the greenhouse effect, and the future Lord Rayleigh, who courted his would-be wife with a book on the physics of sound) that it's easy to become almost as engrossed as the passionate subjects themselves. Hoeppe puts life back into great scientists-all too often reduced, in present usage, to mere adjectives (Brownian motion, Maxwell's laws, etc.)-explaining clearly how their discoveries hang together, how their personal lives and social situations influenced their science, and how the simplest question-why is the sky blue?-has stimulated more than 2,000 years of human exploration.
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Review
"Delivering far more than the title promises, Hoeppe's book describes an intellectual quest that began with the ancients." -- Jon Richfield, New Scientist

"Gotz Hoeppe has a rare gift for making physics and philosophy accessible to the lay reader." -- Fiona Capp, The Age

"...each shade has an natural explanation, hence the size and value of this enlightening book." -- Mark Mortimer, Universe Today

"Hoeppe's account of a complex subject is both lucid and engaging." -- P.D. Smith, Times Literary Supplement

Review
As Götz Hoeppe's excellent history of our attempts to explain the blue of the sky shows, from moments of wonder...scientific theories grow...A thorough and detailed history.
(P. D. Smith Times Literary Supplement )

Praise for the original German edition: "In this richly illustrated volume, the author describes and explains the color and appearance of the firmament, from earlier times to the current day. It is an exciting excursion from mythology, art, and philosophy up through modern science.
(Die Welt )

Praise for the original German edition: "This is a multilayered book that makes a seemingly commonplace observation the starting point of an exciting journey of discovery . . . The color of the sky proves to be the key to understanding many of our cultural achievements in science, art and everyday life.
(1's "Bucherwelt )

Praise for the original German edition: "Hoeppe has succeeded in something completely special: the book combines the research of the natural sciences with philosophical and cultural reflections--all elegantly expressed.
(Saarlandischer Rundfunk )

Delivering far more than the title promises, Hoeppe's book describes an intellectual quest that began with the ancients. He details our growing understanding of the sky's light, and the insights and experiments that brought it about. . . . A well-illustrated, rewarding read.
(Jon Richfield New Scientist )

Hoeppe offers accessible insights into a question that extends well beyond the realm of science.
(Deutsche-Welle )

This book could as easily have been titled 'Is the Sky Blue?' And the answer to that is yes and no.... 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.
(Harry Eagar Maui News )

Sure we all know it's blue, and most of us know why. Or, at least we think we know why. This book shows that our sky comes in as many shades of blue as a painter has in their palette. But each shade has a natural explanation, hence the size and value of this enlightening book. Hoeppe's book works through humanity's understanding of the phenomenon of the blue sky by advancing chronologically....[The] attention to detail, the thoroughness of his review and the vibrant style of writing (even though a translation) make this book worthwhile reading.
(Mark Mortimer Universe Today )

This wonderful, discursive book begins with a child's common question and proceeds to provide and interdisciplinary answer with historical perspective and insight...[Hoeppe] enhances the very perception of both the immediate and farthest reaches of the universe.
(N. Sadanand Choice )

Why the Sky Is Blue is popular science at its best. In fact, it is considerably more than that: in ten chapters, an epilogue, several appendices, notes, and a bibliography of further reading, the book provides a broad overview since classical antiquity of how scholars have grappled with explanations for the intriguing blue color of the sky above us all. As it turns out, the simple question, why the sky is blue, requires a veritable tour de force through western cultural history and the history of science for a complete and satisfactory answer.
(Hans J. Rindisbacher European Legacy )

The subject of this book is interesting enough in its own right, but equally importantly, it is an informative case study of the ways that human thinking has progressed in our attempts to understand the world in which we live.
(David Kay Cosmos Magazine )

Why the Sky Is Blue answers an ancient and surprisingly complex question in an entertaining and accessible way.
(Lunar & Planetary Information Bulletin )

Overall, I found the book to be very well written and translated, well illustrated, and an easy and quite enjoyable read. The author makes use of a number of stories to enhance the subject matter that will make this a very useful textbook for those teaching high school or lower-division undergraduate level courses on the subjects of optics, atmospheric science, and history of science. Noting that there are few books that are currently available on the subject that deal with this historical perspective, I would wholeheartedly recommend this book.
(Jeffrey S. Gaffney Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society )

Customer Reviews

An adult's answer to a child's question
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.

The Blue Sky is no longer cloudy!
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.