Menu-esque Thing

(an explanation for musicians)

 

I have finally figured out why the sunset is red and can explain it in terms of the grand piano. (Hopefully my visual of the innards of a grand piano are accurate.) So why is the sunset red? Extinction! Extinction is not just something that kills off dinosaurs. Extinction kills off light too. It is caused by dust and thingybobbers in the atmosphere floating between us and the sun.

 

Extinction can be mathematically described to go as 1/Wavelength. (This is where the piano comes in.) For all you who don't know, wavelength is just what it sounds like - the length of a wave of light. Things that are red have really big wavelengths; things that are blue have small wavelengths.

 

So, think of your light spectrum (or rainbow) as a grand piano. Middle C represents the amount of red light coming through the atmosphere and three octaves above that, the high C represents the blue light. Now if we suppose there were no extinction, all the strings on the piano would be the same length and it would be a very boring instrument. It would be square and every key would play the same note. All the restaurants would have pianos that played only one note, and dinner guests would complain that there is no atmosphere. If there is no atmosphere, there can be no molecules in the atmosphere. With no molecules in the atmosphere, no light would be extinguished. If no light is extinguished, the sunset would never paint the sky shades of orange and red. Not to mention, if there's not atmosphere, there's nothing for us to breath, and suddenly our problems would be bigger than a few extinct dinosaurs.

 

Doomsday predictions aside, atmosphere and extinction have saved our social lives (even if they have done nothing for the dinosaurs). Because of extinction, our metaphorical grand piano of light is not square, but curved, and all the strings are different lengths. Every key plays a different note and John Williams can compose beautiful musical scores for films that honor dinosaurs.

 

Are you following so far? Ok, now look inside your grand piano (or any piano for that matter). The amount of red light that gets through is like the length of your middle C string while the amount of blue light that gets through is like the length of your high C. Clearly there is a lot more red string than blue string. Thus, the sunset it red.