Why the Sky Is Blue: Discovering the Color of Life

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.