alt Hacker NewsHere is a wonderful lecture with real-world demonstrations of the effect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a0FbQdH3dY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering
I do have a question though.
The article says:
> blue and violet have the closest frequencies to a “resonant frequency” of nitrogen and oxygen molecules’s electron clouds
I thought it was more to do with the photon frequency matching the physical size of the air molecules? Or is that the same as its resonant frequency?
Replies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a0FbQdH3dY&t=2038
Direct link to timestamp 33:56
Fs is the frequency at which whatever your measuring is most efficient at vibrating
So it’s a combination of the composition of the thing and the environmental coupling with other vibrating things
Size and material composition are the primary factors
So for this case, the photon spectrum interact with nitrogen-oxygen mixture most efficiently at the frequency that reflects blue
I mostly studied sound frequency mixing with static objects (matching or cancelling the fs of room/space with the fs of a driver) but the principles of resonance hold across media
Air molecules are much smaller than the wavelength of visible light, by several orders of magnitude. This is why you can't resolve individual molecules in an optical microscope, and why photolithography with visible light doesn't go down to molecular feature sizes.