Colour

In some ways I really love my drive to work. I also really hate it - who wants to spend 30-60 minutes every morning on the motorway?
Some mornings though my mind just wanders and I start thinking about some really weird stuff.
This morning I started thinking about the lunar eclipse (I'm not sure how i got onto it but my mind was totally wandering around the whole subject of the universe and stuff) and how amazing it is that the moon turns red. I dont know if anyone saw it but it was really cool. And now comes the science bit...
When the earth is directly between the sun and the moon, the moon should logically be totally black. After all, there is no light landing on the moon because the earth is in the way.
Anyway, what really happens is that light is refracted (more simply it is bent) as it passes through the earth's atmosphere and therefore some light does make it to the moon. Long wavelengths* of light are less likely to be scattered by the particles in the atmosphere and therefore the predominant wavelength of light that makes it to the moon is the one that appears red to our eyes.

Then my mind wandered again. How amazing is it that our eyes receive all this light which is broken up into different wavelengths* and make a distinction between those light waves that gives us a clear image that we use to navigate the world? It must be an incredibly complex process and it's a really good example of how our biology has adapted to the physics of the universe.

Anyway, I just thought it was something worth sharing. We kind of take our sight for granted but it is an amazingly complex system of biology and physics coming together to provide us with what is probably the most important of our 5 senses.**

*complicated science: light is actually made up of "waves". just like waves on the ocean, some are short and frequent whereas some are long and less frequent. our eyes interpret different wavelengths as different colours from long (red) to short (blue). there are wavelenghts that our eyes cant see which is why you can use special cameras to see in what we interpret as being completely dark.

**hearing is equally amazing to me. when we speak we basically vibrate the air in our mouth which vibrates the air in front of us which vibrates the air around it. eventually the air around your ear is vibrated and your ear is capable of picking up those vibrations which your brain can decode into speach.
Interesting fact: light travels at 299,792,458 metres per second (about 186,282 miles per second) which is just stupidly fast. sound travels at 344 metres per second (in air) which is significantly slower but it's interesting to note that when you speak (loud enough), one second later you have disturbed air 344 metres away.