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The interesting part is not that much Rayleigh scattering - it is obviously very important, but the better question was on WHAT THE HELL light is scattered. Rayleigh had some ideas, like some "dust" that is in the atmosphere, etc. One day, long time ago, a now forgotten Polish physicist Marian Smoluchowski [1], was on the walk in the Alps Mountains (except being physicist he was a professional mountain climber/hiker), he looked at the sky and said - no freaking way, there is no dust over there. So he started thinking and thinking (and Albert Einstein said, after premature death of Smoluchowski, that he was the best thinker he knew) and this moved him into consideration of fairly fresh and new branch of physics at that time - quantum mechanics. As it turned out, that was it. He figured out that light is scattered on quantum fluctuation of the air density, what explained fully blue color of the sky as well as gave a birth to critical opalescence theory. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Smoluchowski - if Smoluchowski hadn't died early, in 1917 from dysentery, he would have been better known, as he would have been awarded three Nobel Prizes (in physics and chemistry), as researches he did were awarded (other guys get the prize). |