August 5, 2023 • 30 mins
Rainbows seem to defy nature, but they're really pretty simple when it comes down to it. Turns out it's just light reacting to water droplets in the air. But they sure do look cool. Learn all about how rainbows are formed in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi, everybody. Not a double rainbow coming your way, just
a single rainbow. In this Selects episode from February three,
two thy fifteen, the Year of Our Lord. This one
is Rainbow's colon Delighting Humanity since Forever. If I'm not mistaken,
that was a Josh Clark title, and I love it.
(00:23):
Good job, my friend. Check it out. We explain all
about how rainbows work, and now you can know too. Enjoy.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with
Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry Rowland. Have we ever
said Jerry's last night don't mix? So? Well? We have.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Now it's out there. It's on the internet. Even someone
really updated our Wikipedia page. If you look lately, it's
robust that even says they're producer Jerry Jerome Rowland. How
do they know that? I guess I've said it on
the podcast before.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
I am sure that you have. So how are you doing?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I'm great man, Rainbow's As the author points out, they've
inspired countless fairy tale songs and legends.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Man, I love rainbows. I think rainbows are just fantastic
They're probably the greatest graphic design of all time. I
just think rainbows are great.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Well, it is funny to when you read the different
articles how people it's kind of corny when they talk
about how they delight in astound. But darn it, when
you see a rainbow, even as a jaded, cynical adult,
there's no way you can't look and just go.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Oh, that's pretty neat.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Yeah, at the very least, you'll go, oh, a rainbow.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
If somebody says, hey, there's a rainbow over there, you're
going to look up.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
I don't care.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
And if you doubt, if you doubt a rainbow's ability
to astound adults, all you have to do is look
up Yosembity Bears Double Rainbow video, which I watched today.
It's pretty pretty great stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
All Bear Vesquez. Yeah, yeah, that guy's what.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Does it mean?
Speaker 1 (02:11):
I know what it means. You're on peyote. You know.
Next time someone does see a rainbow and say that,
I'm gonna test everything and just say so, and I'm
gonna luck, all right, see if they just think I'm
dead inside.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Let's see what happens, all right. I'm curious to see
whether you can not look, of course, I look so
chuck that we're not the first to be delighted and
amused by rainbows. It goes back several years, decades at least,
they've been around forever. There There is a lot of
mythology surrounding them, because you know, they're unusual. They don't
(02:44):
happen every day, and well, I guess they depends on
where you live, but it's not necessarily a normal occurrence.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
No. I found that the philosopher Descartes Rene Descartes was
the first to describe kind of the modern accurate theory
in sixteen thirty seven.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Oh yeah, yeah, nice.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
He's the first one. And it's like, hey, wait a minute,
there's some refraction and going on here.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Right, Well, most people usually associate that with Newton.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Yeah, well he's the first one to describe the spectrum.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Right he was. And apparently I saw this cool video
by Philip Ball on The Atlantic that basically it said
that Newton just made up the ROYGBIV spectrum. What do
you mean, so the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
(03:37):
Sure is Newton's interpretation of the rainbow. Before that, all
sorts of different cultures had different ideas of what made
up a rainbow, how many colors there were, what the
colors were, and our interpretation of the rainbow spectrum is
a Newtonian invention, and a lot of people say, it's
not seven, it's actually six, Indigo, not really there Newton
(04:02):
And apparently Newton was trying to shoehorn the rainbow spectrum
into the musical octave. So he's he tried. He's trying
to shoehorn music, which has sound wavelengths with light, which
has wavelengths, and making them one and the same. But
history has kind of shown like, no, there's six. Yeah,
(04:23):
we'll go with six for the rainbow. So Roy GBIV,
which we learned in school. Yeah, apparently I learned school.
You did too, Oh yeah, yeah, sure, it's just Roy Gibb.
There's no way to go.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yeah. Well he was busy making is h cookies from
figs too, so he had lots of stuff going on.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Those are good.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Oh yeah, I can mound some picnicts.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Yeah, because they're good for you, so you can eat
the whole bag one's sitting if you want.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah. I'd never buy them, but if I see them
on like if you give blood or something, they're on
a snack table. That's when I get my fig Newton on.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yeah, so Newton wasn't the only one. Before Newton, there
was like a whole Celtic legend about the pot of
gold at the end of the rainbow. There was God
saying more bad after the Great Flood and promising it
would never happen again by showing rainbows come out after rains,
like it's fine, it's stopping, We're not going to flood
the earth again.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Of course, you can't find a pot of gold at
the end of a rainbow because you cannot go to
the end of a rainbow. Yes, you never. You can't
go under a rainbow. You can't go over a rainbow.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
And we'll explain all this why in just a second. Sure,
but first forget we have to talk about to get
to the bottom of how rainbows work, which to me
I think is awesome. It's one of those things where Okay,
this is how it works, we understand it now. Yeah,
I love science. Stuff like that, baked in science, yes,
just done. It's not like scientists think this is what's happening,
(05:51):
and it's probably true, but that remains to be seen.
This is one of those ones where, like we know
how rainbows work, and here's how. But to get to
the bottom of rainbows, we have to understand how light
works first.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah, and I thought this article, even though there was
a lot more digging in to do, I thought the
shopping cart explanation for the basically how light travels, yeah,
was pretty pretty darn good, fantastic. You know. One reason
they say visible spectrum is because the light is moving
so fast that you can't see it. It's like and
(06:23):
the combination of all those is white light, like the
sun is white light, because all those colors are super
imposed on one another. Yeah, But when it hits like
a water droplet or something else, it's going to slow
down enough, and we'll get to all this where you
can see those individual parts of the spectrum.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Right, And that shopping cart explanation, like you said, it
definitely simplifies the whole thing, and it's not quite right,
but it does a pretty good job of illustrating the
principles that are going on, you know.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, So basically light is moving at different speeds depending
on what kind of medium it's traveling through. Right, So,
like I said, when it hits water, it's going to
slow down a lot. That's going to change its speed.
If you're pushing a shopping cart, the asphalt is the medium.
If you push it onto grass, it's going to slow down.
That's a new medium. It's a new medium.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
It's gone. It's transitioned from one media to another.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
That's right. And if you hit that grass at an angle,
and we've probably done this if you had to, we're
able to steal a shopping cart. As a kid, you're
pushing your friends around in it, you're hauling through the neighborhood,
and you hit that grass at an angle, and it's
going to take a really sharp turn because that front
right wheel, let's say, is going to hit the grass
and all of a sudden, really quickly, it's going to
(07:38):
be traveling at a much slower speed than the rest
of it, and your friend's going to tumble out, and
everyone's going to have a good time.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Exactly. Just wear your helmet so that imagine that the
shopping cart is a photon of light or a beam
of white visible sunlight, and the grass is a prism. Yeah,
so the parking lot was air and it was moving through.
Just find no problem. But when it hit that prism,
(08:05):
it slowed down. Yes, And because it came at an angle.
One side of the light hit sooner and it made
it turn, and that is called refraction. The bending of
light is refraction.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Yeah. And in the case of a rainbow, that prism
is a rain drop. So I mean this is the
simple quick version. We'll get more detailed. But when it
hits that rain drop, it's going to slow down and
it's going to bend.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Right. So depending on the reflective index, which is how
much light bends, depending on the wavelength, the wavelength of light,
which is another term for color, sure is going to
bend at a different angle. So when that visible light,
(08:48):
which is all the colors of the visible spectrum combined,
hits a prism and it bends or a rain drop, right,
it bends at different angles because the wavelengths are different,
and so that visible light comes undone into its component wavelengths,
which are all the colors of the rainbow, and they
spread out.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
It's called dispersion, right, Yeah, And that's it really. But
like I said, in this case, we're talking about rain
and because rain is you know, rain drops are all
different shapes and sizes, it's not going to be as
consistent as like a prism might be but it's going
to have the same effect. It's going to hit the
(09:29):
rain drop, it's going to slow down like the wheel
digging into the grass of the shopping cart, and it's
going to refract, and some of it's going to keep going.
Some of it's going to bounce back, but different the
different color is going to bounce at a different angle.
And it's all relative to where you are on the ground. Like,
(09:49):
no person two people see the same rainbow, right, So
we're all subjective.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Right, So when light hits the prism and it bends,
like you said, because the different lights have different wavelengths,
different colors have different wavelengths. Red has the longest wavelength,
so it bends the least. Yes, I believe violet has
the shortest wavelength, so it bends the most. But because
(10:16):
again because of these different wavelengths, they bend differently, so
that the light spreads apart and when it exits the prism,
it bends again and it forms that spectrum of separated
light separated out.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And this, if you notice we keep saying the word bend,
That's why a rainbow is an arc instead of like
a right angle, because the light is bending.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
So Chuck We've been kind of teasing this a little bit,
but we'll get into exactly how you go from prism
ter rain, drop and hence to rainbow right after this.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
All right, if you want to see a rainbow, or
if you're gonna see a rainbow, there need to be
three conditions. The sun's got to be behind you, big one.
You're gonna have moisture in front of you, right, and
you the sun must be shining that those sun's rays
must be shining at forty two degrees of what's called
the antisolar point, which is basically where the shadow of
(11:33):
your head is on the ground. Okay, so if you
can see the shadow of your head, that's gonna be
that forty two degree antisolar point, right.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
So what you do is you put your back directly
to the sun, right, yeah, and then turn forty two degrees,
which I guess if it were negative forty two degrees,
you'd be turning to the left. So I guess you'd
be turning to the right a little bit about forty
two degrees, which you can kind of measure off in
your head. It's not quite for forty five degrees. And
if you're looking at rain and the sun's behind you.
(12:05):
You're gonna see where that forty two degrees is because
once you hit that point, there's your rainbow.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Yeah, but I mean you can move your body around
and still see the rainbow. I mean it's where the
sun is hitting. The sun's got to be hitting it
at forty two degrees.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I see. Okay, so Chuck, it doesn't matter then where
your head is. It's it's the rain drop's relation to
the sun. This needs to be forty two degrees the
producer rainbow.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Yeah, the sunshine must be hitting it at forty two degrees.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Okay, So let's let's get back to basics again for
a second. When the sunlight hits the rain drop, each
individual rain drop is acting like a prism, right, that's right.
So that visible white light is hitting a rain drop, Yeah,
it's hitting it at an angle. It's going kaboom into
like a colored spectrum inside the rain drop, and then
(12:59):
it's gonna flecked back again, refract again, exiting the rain drop,
so it bends again and it comes back at you.
The thing is is when you see a light colored
light wavelength from a rain drop, you're not seeing the
whole spectrum. You're not seeing millions of little rainbows. You're
(13:20):
seeing one big rainbow. And the reason why is because
each individual rain drop, depending on its relation to you
and I guess to the sun, is shooting one color
at you. It's shooting all colors at you, but you're
only picking up on one color because there's only one
color from a rain drop that is angled correctly to
(13:41):
you and your line of sight so that it's the
only one you're picking up on is red. And then
all of the rain drops around that rain drop are
doing the same thing. They're shooting about in relation to
your line of sight, red towards you. But then the
rain drops a little lower than that, right are shooting yellow,
(14:02):
and then lower than that green, and so on and
so on, and so you get to violet. And so
these groups are rain these groups of rain drops are
producing this rainbow cumulatively as far as your line of
sight is concerned.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah, because the rain is just falling, so where it
is in the sky, I mean, as it falls, it's
going to be changing color.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Right.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
You know, it's not like frozen in mid air or anything.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
But it seems like it.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
But it seems like it right exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Isn't that phenomenal.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
It really is.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
I just think that's just as cool as it gets.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Yeah, it's super cool. And you'll always notice too, the
sky under the rainbow is going to be brighter than out.
And when you've got a double rainbow, which we'll get to,
the area between those two is usually really dark, right,
And that's.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Called the Alexander's Dark Band.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yeah, Alexander's Band because he was Alexander Afrio Aphrodisius was
the first dude, huh to describe that. That's a great name,
Alexander Afrodisias. Yeah, it's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
It sounds like a seventies exploitation movie or something totally.
But yeah. So the reason why in between the double
rainbows you have Alexander's Band is because the light there
is reflecting away from you and it's so it's a
dark area.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
So the sunlight hitting those rain drops is going away
like oh, it's dark inside the rainbow, all of that
light is reflecting back to you and you're seeing all
of the different colors come at you and they're recombining
indivisible light, so there's no color, it's just bright sunlight
in the middle.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, and that you know, sunlight they also always describe
it as white, I mean, sunlight as all the colors.
We just you know, can't see it.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Yeah, we should really do a whole How Color Works episode.
It's fascinating stuff. But yeah, depending on whether you're a
painter who's mixing chemical, whether you're a chemist or a physicist, Yeah,
white is either the presence of all colors or the
absence of color.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Right, you know, it's kind of mind blowing.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
We should totally do how color Works.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Well, I guess after this break we'll talk a little
bit more about the double rainbow all the way and
even well we'll just leave it at that.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
What does it mean? So, Chuck, you want to talk
(16:44):
about double rainbows and what forms them?
Speaker 1 (16:46):
It's pretty much the same thing.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Right, Yeah, the lights refracted twice.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah, it's just a double refraction.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Yeah. Well, what's cool is if you look at a
double rainbow, the one on top, the higher one that's
the second refraction, Yes, is reversed. So rather than red
being on the top, yeah, it's on the bottom. Yeah,
it's a reverse rainbow, is what a double rainbow is.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
And you can have a triple and even a quad. Nice,
but it's rare. Yeah, like I've seen a little bit
of a triple once. I think, to where you just
see the faintest hint of that third one. And if
you're seeing that, that means the niche I think it's
called the primary and secondary. That means your primary is
super super super sharp. Yeah, to where it looks like
(17:34):
it's drawn on the sky, painted on the sky. Nice,
and then your secondary is gonna be a little more
faint than the third one because the triple refraction. You know,
it's not the easiest thing to occur in nature.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, And one of the things that makes the primary
rainbow and then hence the secondary. And I guess tertiarian
so on rainbows bright is the amount of sunlight and
the number of rain drops because remember those rain drops
that you're seeing that the spectrum is made up of
light wavelengths that's coming at you from a bunch of
(18:06):
different rain drops and they reinforce one another, and the
more they reinforce one another, the brighter the rainbow is.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Yeah, and you'll, I mean, I feel like I usually
see rainbows when it's not raining where I'm standing, right,
but that doesn't matter. It's you know, oh, you.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Can be being rained on and still see the rainbow.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Well, yeah, but it's like sometimes it's like a super
light rain where it has just rained really hard. Maybe
it's tapering off or maybe stopped altogether. But the point
is where the rainbow is. It's not like they said earlier,
you can't drive up to a rainbow. I'm going to
go up and find that thing, because it's just a
perspective trick basically. Right.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
The only apparently from this Scientific American article you sent,
the only visual information we get from a rainbow is
the band of its arc.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Yeah, and everything else is what's around.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
It, right, right, So, like, if a rainbow seems really huge,
it's because, say, the mountains in the background look small,
which makes the rainbow, by contrast, look very big and majestic.
If we're close to, say, like the mountains are like
a cell phone tower or something like that, the rainbow
may look very small by comparison.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Yeah, And the way they liken it, and that I
think in that article I think was like the human head,
it's like roughly the same size, but if it was
right in front of your face, it would block out
a whole movie screen. But if it was further away,
it would just be like, hey, there's that guy's head.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
It's the same thing, same thing. And then Phil Plait,
who's who does the Bad Astronomer blog for Slate, he
did a pretty good explanation of full circle rainbows.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yeah, I had never ever heard of that until you
sent me that. So it makes sense though.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
It totally does. So remember we talked about a rainbow
arcing over the sky and because the light is bent
out of the prism.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Well, no, it's because it starts on one part of
the ground and ends on another part of the ground, right.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Where the goal is. The reason why it has that
arc is because what you're seeing is part of what
really is a full circle, and it's depending on where
you are. Now, you have a certain amount of rain
drops available to reflect the light to you.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Right, So when you're on the ground and you're looking
up or just over to the horizon, sure you have
a certain amount of rain drops available to you to
form a rainbow. If you were able to get away
from the ground, you have even more rain drops not
just above you, but now below you as well, and
you can see a full circle. That is the actual
(20:39):
real rainbow. Yeah, so a real rainbow depending on where
you are in relation to the ground is either a
part of a circle, an arc, or a full circle.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, and there was a picture. I mean he said
that pilots see him all the time, or I guess
if you're in astute flyer, that's not just like a
sleep with a black blankets, right, Yeah, you can look
out a window of a plane and see one too,
because you're above it. Right, It's pretty neat. I mean,
there was a photo of one and it was like,
oh wow, there's a full circle rainbow.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Full circle rainbow. It looks it looks kind of like
a lens flare a little bit, but yeah, to a
rainbow lens flair and Phil Plate had in that same
blog post a double circle rainbow, which was really neat.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Yeah, so go check that out. I agree that was
pretty cool. Yeah, you know that thing we were talking
about earlier too, about the perspective. That's why the I
think I thought you did it. Don't be dumb about
why the moon looks bigger? Have you done that?
Speaker 2 (21:41):
No, it's so why can you see the moon during
the day sometimes?
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Oh why is that?
Speaker 2 (21:47):
Well, I'll tell you why.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Because I saw it like a one the other day
that was like super late in the day.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Well, the reason why. A better question is why can't
you see the moon all the time, even during the day.
So it's not the Moon's very bright. It's the brightest
object in the sky, second only to the Sun. Sure,
but it also gets its light from the Sun. So
most of the time when you can't see the Moon
during the day, it's because the moon is behind you, right,
(22:15):
So the light that it's getting from the Sun is
behind you. Now, if the moon is closer to the Sun,
like depending on where the moon is in its lunar phase,
then you can look up and see the Sun and
the Moon at the same time. It's above the horizon.
In other words, Oh okay, so if the moon were
always visible above the horizon, you'd always be able to
(22:35):
see it during the day, gotcha. And it just has
to do with where it is in relation to the
Sun in the lunar phase. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1 (22:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (22:44):
If it's just go watch that, don't be dumb on it.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Yeah, they call that a bonus, an impromptu bonus.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
But the reason why the moon will look really huge
in the sky is because the same thing we're talking
about with the perspective, like the mountain is like when
you're low on the horizon, and it's gonna look enormous.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Right if there's a lot less stuff, Yeah, near close
to you, Yeah, it's gonna look very big.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Yeah. And when I went to Montana years ago. My
explanation I got because you step off the plane and
you think, wow, the sky does look bigger, Like what's
the deal? They call it Big Sky Country, and it
really does look bigger. And the explanation I got from
the locals, which it's because the clouds. So again it's
just a perspective trick.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
So like the mountains are way over there.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
I think it's just the clouds that they typically get
are the big, huge, puffy clouds.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
But they look big in relation to the mountains in
the distance.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Yeah, I think that's the deal. So it makes the
sky appear to look larger.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Plus I imagine also there's fewer obstacles and obstructions, so
that it's just there's more sky to see and take
in just looking around, right.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah. Yeah, Like when I lived in Yuma and you
go out in the desert and you can see like
one hundred and degrees from horizon to horizon, right, But
they don't have the cloud formations, So the sky looks
bigger in Montana than it does like in the middle
of the desert. Yeah, because most of the time in
the desert you're going to see that, you know, just blue,
nothing but blue. Yeah, so there's no perspective nice, you know,
(24:15):
like when you take a picture of something to sell
on eBay, you put your fist next to it so
people know how big it is.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Is that what people do?
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Sure, I've seen quarters and rulers. Never seen a fish.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah, that's quarters and rulers. That's probably a better rule
of thumb.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Yeah right, Yeah, so, Chuck, I got a couple other things. Apparently,
when you look at a rainbow, it's not an even
division or an even representation of all the colors. You
see the most red, it's the most visible. Apparently, thirty
eight percent of a rainbow is red and green is
second at fifteen. Blue is the least with just eleven percent.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
What is green?
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Green is twenty two percent? Okay, twenty two percent of
rainbow green?
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Interesting. I wonder what color blind we need to do
on color blindness. But it's I looked into the article
and it was just sort of started to melt my brain. Yeah,
like all this stuff. So I just said, no, put
that on the back burner.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
I think you did a great job with this.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Well we'll see, I'm sure we'll get stuff wrong.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
And lastly, the LGBT rainbow flag designed in nineteen seventy
eight by a guy named Gilbert Baker. Really and it
used to have eight. It had turquoise and hot pink
on it before. Yeah, but apparently they ran out of
fabric for hot pink because the things like started to
take off, so they discontinued that, and I think the
same went for the turquoise one. Too interesting, we just
(25:42):
went with six.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
And now is it a it's a shining monument for establishments,
for people to say I want to go in there,
and some people to say I don't want to go
in there, sadly, right, you know.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
We went to a gay bar in Philadelphia one afternoon,
and I say, by accident, not like it was a
big deal.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Was it the Blue Oyster?
Speaker 1 (26:07):
No? No, And it was in the afternoon, so that
was just you know, you know how it is in
some bars in the afternoon. Yeah, like the the serious
regulars are in there.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Sure it doesn't matter gay, straight, whatever, and.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
They were very cool guys, and they were like, uh,
and it was a big group of us, and I
think they were like, you know, you know you're in
a gay bar, right, And they were kind of pointing
that out. And I was like, oh, well, great, serve
me a bloody Mary then, right exactly, Like I didn't
know if he thought we were. I think he knew
where from out of town. Sure, so he was just
a letter yeah, yeah, like he didn't want any trouble.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Oh gotcha, you know.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
I was like, we're not like that, my friend.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
That's good.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Just a happy accident.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Does a good ending to the rainbow episode. Yeah. Uh.
If you want to know more about rainbows, go check
out our article on the site rainbows. Just type that
word into how stuff works. Go check out that Slate
and Scientific American in the Atlantic. Some good stuff out there.
And I said search bar. I think in there somewhere,
which means it is time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
That's right. I'm gonna call this Pliny the Beer and
this is from Cory and I think Corey's in San Francisco. Hey, guys,
love the podcast. I was listening to Cinnamon today and
there was an exchange about Pliny and a comment that
there was one and only. I think anyone in the
(27:33):
Bay Area would know that there are two Pliny's, the
Elder and the Younger. That's because one of our local
breweries has a beer called Pliny the Elder, which is
known by beer ficionados as one of the best beers
out there. In fact, it sells out weekly from local groceries.
They also make a Pliny the Younger, which only comes
out for two weeks a year, and people wait in
(27:55):
line for hours just to get a pint. And there
is also a real historical Pliny the Elder and Planty
the Younger, who was his nephew.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
I didn't realize it was his nephew, and.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
That is from Corey. And I did look it up
because the two weeks thing, I did not believe it,
but I just, you know, sometimes you want to see
it with your own eyes, huh. And yeah, Pliny the
Younger is a triple IPA.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Oh well, that sounds awesome.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Named for the nephew and adopted son evidently, and it
is pub draft only. They don't even bottle it, very
limited distribution locally and it's seasonal, so for just two
weeks a year in February at the Bay of Bengal.
You can get it in a bar, I guess in
San Francisco. Nice and it is a ten point twenty
(28:42):
five percenter Wow, Yeah, as opposed to eight for the Elder.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
And they're both IPAs.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Yeah, one's the double and the triple, so that's a
live Yeah, and you can get to planey the Elder
and the bottles. It's not quite as exclusive to try
that on our tour. Yeah, I guess only the Elder
and yes, someone.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Unless we luck out and happen to be there during
that two week period. Huh.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Well, no, it's in February always that what you said.
But if there's a bar out there that maybe wanted
to just say we're out.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Pint, put it under the bar, save it for a
month for us, we'll be there.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
I don't think that's going to happen.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
If you want to correct us after we get something
flagrantly wrong, like we did with the whole plainy thing,
you can tweet to us at sysk podcast. You can
post it on Facebook dot com slash stuff you should know.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
HowStuffWorks dot com, and as always, joined us at our
home on the web, Stuff Youshould Know dot Com. Stuff
(29:44):
you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, everybody. Not a double rainbow coming your way, just
a single rainbow. In this Selects episode from February three,
two thy fifteen, the Year of Our Lord. This one
is Rainbow's colon Delighting Humanity since Forever. If I'm not mistaken,
that was a Josh Clark title, and I love it.
(00:23):
Good job, my friend. Check it out. We explain all
about how rainbows work, and now you can know too. Enjoy.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with
Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry Rowland. Have we ever
said Jerry's last night don't mix? So? Well? We have.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Now it's out there. It's on the internet. Even someone
really updated our Wikipedia page. If you look lately, it's
robust that even says they're producer Jerry Jerome Rowland. How
do they know that? I guess I've said it on
the podcast before.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
I am sure that you have. So how are you doing?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I'm great man, Rainbow's As the author points out, they've
inspired countless fairy tale songs and legends.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Man, I love rainbows. I think rainbows are just fantastic
They're probably the greatest graphic design of all time. I
just think rainbows are great.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Well, it is funny to when you read the different
articles how people it's kind of corny when they talk
about how they delight in astound. But darn it, when
you see a rainbow, even as a jaded, cynical adult,
there's no way you can't look and just go.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Oh, that's pretty neat.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Yeah, at the very least, you'll go, oh, a rainbow.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
If somebody says, hey, there's a rainbow over there, you're
going to look up.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
I don't care.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
And if you doubt, if you doubt a rainbow's ability
to astound adults, all you have to do is look
up Yosembity Bears Double Rainbow video, which I watched today.
It's pretty pretty great stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
All Bear Vesquez. Yeah, yeah, that guy's what.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Does it mean?
Speaker 1 (02:11):
I know what it means. You're on peyote. You know.
Next time someone does see a rainbow and say that,
I'm gonna test everything and just say so, and I'm
gonna luck, all right, see if they just think I'm
dead inside.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Let's see what happens, all right. I'm curious to see
whether you can not look, of course, I look so
chuck that we're not the first to be delighted and
amused by rainbows. It goes back several years, decades at least,
they've been around forever. There There is a lot of
mythology surrounding them, because you know, they're unusual. They don't
(02:44):
happen every day, and well, I guess they depends on
where you live, but it's not necessarily a normal occurrence.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
No. I found that the philosopher Descartes Rene Descartes was
the first to describe kind of the modern accurate theory
in sixteen thirty seven.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Oh yeah, yeah, nice.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
He's the first one. And it's like, hey, wait a minute,
there's some refraction and going on here.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Right, Well, most people usually associate that with Newton.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Yeah, well he's the first one to describe the spectrum.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Right he was. And apparently I saw this cool video
by Philip Ball on The Atlantic that basically it said
that Newton just made up the ROYGBIV spectrum. What do
you mean, so the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
(03:37):
Sure is Newton's interpretation of the rainbow. Before that, all
sorts of different cultures had different ideas of what made
up a rainbow, how many colors there were, what the
colors were, and our interpretation of the rainbow spectrum is
a Newtonian invention, and a lot of people say, it's
not seven, it's actually six, Indigo, not really there Newton
(04:02):
And apparently Newton was trying to shoehorn the rainbow spectrum
into the musical octave. So he's he tried. He's trying
to shoehorn music, which has sound wavelengths with light, which
has wavelengths, and making them one and the same. But
history has kind of shown like, no, there's six. Yeah,
(04:23):
we'll go with six for the rainbow. So Roy GBIV,
which we learned in school. Yeah, apparently I learned school.
You did too, Oh yeah, yeah, sure, it's just Roy Gibb.
There's no way to go.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yeah. Well he was busy making is h cookies from
figs too, so he had lots of stuff going on.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Those are good.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Oh yeah, I can mound some picnicts.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Yeah, because they're good for you, so you can eat
the whole bag one's sitting if you want.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah. I'd never buy them, but if I see them
on like if you give blood or something, they're on
a snack table. That's when I get my fig Newton on.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yeah, so Newton wasn't the only one. Before Newton, there
was like a whole Celtic legend about the pot of
gold at the end of the rainbow. There was God
saying more bad after the Great Flood and promising it
would never happen again by showing rainbows come out after rains,
like it's fine, it's stopping, We're not going to flood
the earth again.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Of course, you can't find a pot of gold at
the end of a rainbow because you cannot go to
the end of a rainbow. Yes, you never. You can't
go under a rainbow. You can't go over a rainbow.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
And we'll explain all this why in just a second. Sure,
but first forget we have to talk about to get
to the bottom of how rainbows work, which to me
I think is awesome. It's one of those things where Okay,
this is how it works, we understand it now. Yeah,
I love science. Stuff like that, baked in science, yes,
just done. It's not like scientists think this is what's happening,
(05:51):
and it's probably true, but that remains to be seen.
This is one of those ones where, like we know
how rainbows work, and here's how. But to get to
the bottom of rainbows, we have to understand how light
works first.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah, and I thought this article, even though there was
a lot more digging in to do, I thought the
shopping cart explanation for the basically how light travels, yeah,
was pretty pretty darn good, fantastic. You know. One reason
they say visible spectrum is because the light is moving
so fast that you can't see it. It's like and
(06:23):
the combination of all those is white light, like the
sun is white light, because all those colors are super
imposed on one another. Yeah, But when it hits like
a water droplet or something else, it's going to slow
down enough, and we'll get to all this where you
can see those individual parts of the spectrum.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Right, And that shopping cart explanation, like you said, it
definitely simplifies the whole thing, and it's not quite right,
but it does a pretty good job of illustrating the
principles that are going on, you know.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, So basically light is moving at different speeds depending
on what kind of medium it's traveling through. Right, So,
like I said, when it hits water, it's going to
slow down a lot. That's going to change its speed.
If you're pushing a shopping cart, the asphalt is the medium.
If you push it onto grass, it's going to slow down.
That's a new medium. It's a new medium.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
It's gone. It's transitioned from one media to another.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
That's right. And if you hit that grass at an angle,
and we've probably done this if you had to, we're
able to steal a shopping cart. As a kid, you're
pushing your friends around in it, you're hauling through the neighborhood,
and you hit that grass at an angle, and it's
going to take a really sharp turn because that front
right wheel, let's say, is going to hit the grass
and all of a sudden, really quickly, it's going to
(07:38):
be traveling at a much slower speed than the rest
of it, and your friend's going to tumble out, and
everyone's going to have a good time.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Exactly. Just wear your helmet so that imagine that the
shopping cart is a photon of light or a beam
of white visible sunlight, and the grass is a prism. Yeah,
so the parking lot was air and it was moving through.
Just find no problem. But when it hit that prism,
(08:05):
it slowed down. Yes, And because it came at an angle.
One side of the light hit sooner and it made
it turn, and that is called refraction. The bending of
light is refraction.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Yeah. And in the case of a rainbow, that prism
is a rain drop. So I mean this is the
simple quick version. We'll get more detailed. But when it
hits that rain drop, it's going to slow down and
it's going to bend.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Right. So depending on the reflective index, which is how
much light bends, depending on the wavelength, the wavelength of light,
which is another term for color, sure is going to
bend at a different angle. So when that visible light,
(08:48):
which is all the colors of the visible spectrum combined,
hits a prism and it bends or a rain drop, right,
it bends at different angles because the wavelengths are different,
and so that visible light comes undone into its component wavelengths,
which are all the colors of the rainbow, and they
spread out.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
It's called dispersion, right, Yeah, And that's it really. But
like I said, in this case, we're talking about rain
and because rain is you know, rain drops are all
different shapes and sizes, it's not going to be as
consistent as like a prism might be but it's going
to have the same effect. It's going to hit the
(09:29):
rain drop, it's going to slow down like the wheel
digging into the grass of the shopping cart, and it's
going to refract, and some of it's going to keep going.
Some of it's going to bounce back, but different the
different color is going to bounce at a different angle.
And it's all relative to where you are on the ground. Like,
(09:49):
no person two people see the same rainbow, right, So
we're all subjective.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Right, So when light hits the prism and it bends,
like you said, because the different lights have different wavelengths,
different colors have different wavelengths. Red has the longest wavelength,
so it bends the least. Yes, I believe violet has
the shortest wavelength, so it bends the most. But because
(10:16):
again because of these different wavelengths, they bend differently, so
that the light spreads apart and when it exits the prism,
it bends again and it forms that spectrum of separated
light separated out.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And this, if you notice we keep saying the word bend,
That's why a rainbow is an arc instead of like
a right angle, because the light is bending.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
So Chuck We've been kind of teasing this a little bit,
but we'll get into exactly how you go from prism
ter rain, drop and hence to rainbow right after this.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
All right, if you want to see a rainbow, or
if you're gonna see a rainbow, there need to be
three conditions. The sun's got to be behind you, big one.
You're gonna have moisture in front of you, right, and
you the sun must be shining that those sun's rays
must be shining at forty two degrees of what's called
the antisolar point, which is basically where the shadow of
(11:33):
your head is on the ground. Okay, so if you
can see the shadow of your head, that's gonna be
that forty two degree antisolar point, right.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
So what you do is you put your back directly
to the sun, right, yeah, and then turn forty two degrees,
which I guess if it were negative forty two degrees,
you'd be turning to the left. So I guess you'd
be turning to the right a little bit about forty
two degrees, which you can kind of measure off in
your head. It's not quite for forty five degrees. And
if you're looking at rain and the sun's behind you.
(12:05):
You're gonna see where that forty two degrees is because
once you hit that point, there's your rainbow.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Yeah, but I mean you can move your body around
and still see the rainbow. I mean it's where the
sun is hitting. The sun's got to be hitting it
at forty two degrees.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I see. Okay, so Chuck, it doesn't matter then where
your head is. It's it's the rain drop's relation to
the sun. This needs to be forty two degrees the
producer rainbow.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Yeah, the sunshine must be hitting it at forty two degrees.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Okay, So let's let's get back to basics again for
a second. When the sunlight hits the rain drop, each
individual rain drop is acting like a prism, right, that's right.
So that visible white light is hitting a rain drop, Yeah,
it's hitting it at an angle. It's going kaboom into
like a colored spectrum inside the rain drop, and then
(12:59):
it's gonna flecked back again, refract again, exiting the rain drop,
so it bends again and it comes back at you.
The thing is is when you see a light colored
light wavelength from a rain drop, you're not seeing the
whole spectrum. You're not seeing millions of little rainbows. You're
(13:20):
seeing one big rainbow. And the reason why is because
each individual rain drop, depending on its relation to you
and I guess to the sun, is shooting one color
at you. It's shooting all colors at you, but you're
only picking up on one color because there's only one
color from a rain drop that is angled correctly to
(13:41):
you and your line of sight so that it's the
only one you're picking up on is red. And then
all of the rain drops around that rain drop are
doing the same thing. They're shooting about in relation to
your line of sight, red towards you. But then the
rain drops a little lower than that, right are shooting yellow,
(14:02):
and then lower than that green, and so on and
so on, and so you get to violet. And so
these groups are rain these groups of rain drops are
producing this rainbow cumulatively as far as your line of
sight is concerned.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah, because the rain is just falling, so where it
is in the sky, I mean, as it falls, it's
going to be changing color.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Right.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
You know, it's not like frozen in mid air or anything.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
But it seems like it.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
But it seems like it right exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Isn't that phenomenal.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
It really is.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
I just think that's just as cool as it gets.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Yeah, it's super cool. And you'll always notice too, the
sky under the rainbow is going to be brighter than out.
And when you've got a double rainbow, which we'll get to,
the area between those two is usually really dark, right,
And that's.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Called the Alexander's Dark Band.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yeah, Alexander's Band because he was Alexander Afrio Aphrodisius was
the first dude, huh to describe that. That's a great name,
Alexander Afrodisias. Yeah, it's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
It sounds like a seventies exploitation movie or something totally.
But yeah. So the reason why in between the double
rainbows you have Alexander's Band is because the light there
is reflecting away from you and it's so it's a
dark area.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
So the sunlight hitting those rain drops is going away
like oh, it's dark inside the rainbow, all of that
light is reflecting back to you and you're seeing all
of the different colors come at you and they're recombining
indivisible light, so there's no color, it's just bright sunlight
in the middle.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, and that you know, sunlight they also always describe
it as white, I mean, sunlight as all the colors.
We just you know, can't see it.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Yeah, we should really do a whole How Color Works episode.
It's fascinating stuff. But yeah, depending on whether you're a
painter who's mixing chemical, whether you're a chemist or a physicist, Yeah,
white is either the presence of all colors or the
absence of color.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Right, you know, it's kind of mind blowing.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
We should totally do how color Works.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Well, I guess after this break we'll talk a little
bit more about the double rainbow all the way and
even well we'll just leave it at that.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
What does it mean? So, Chuck, you want to talk
(16:44):
about double rainbows and what forms them?
Speaker 1 (16:46):
It's pretty much the same thing.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Right, Yeah, the lights refracted twice.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah, it's just a double refraction.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Yeah. Well, what's cool is if you look at a
double rainbow, the one on top, the higher one that's
the second refraction, Yes, is reversed. So rather than red
being on the top, yeah, it's on the bottom. Yeah,
it's a reverse rainbow, is what a double rainbow is.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
And you can have a triple and even a quad. Nice,
but it's rare. Yeah, like I've seen a little bit
of a triple once. I think, to where you just
see the faintest hint of that third one. And if
you're seeing that, that means the niche I think it's
called the primary and secondary. That means your primary is
super super super sharp. Yeah, to where it looks like
(17:34):
it's drawn on the sky, painted on the sky. Nice,
and then your secondary is gonna be a little more
faint than the third one because the triple refraction. You know,
it's not the easiest thing to occur in nature.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, And one of the things that makes the primary
rainbow and then hence the secondary. And I guess tertiarian
so on rainbows bright is the amount of sunlight and
the number of rain drops because remember those rain drops
that you're seeing that the spectrum is made up of
light wavelengths that's coming at you from a bunch of
(18:06):
different rain drops and they reinforce one another, and the
more they reinforce one another, the brighter the rainbow is.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Yeah, and you'll, I mean, I feel like I usually
see rainbows when it's not raining where I'm standing, right,
but that doesn't matter. It's you know, oh, you.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Can be being rained on and still see the rainbow.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Well, yeah, but it's like sometimes it's like a super
light rain where it has just rained really hard. Maybe
it's tapering off or maybe stopped altogether. But the point
is where the rainbow is. It's not like they said earlier,
you can't drive up to a rainbow. I'm going to
go up and find that thing, because it's just a
perspective trick basically. Right.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
The only apparently from this Scientific American article you sent,
the only visual information we get from a rainbow is
the band of its arc.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Yeah, and everything else is what's around.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
It, right, right, So, like, if a rainbow seems really huge,
it's because, say, the mountains in the background look small,
which makes the rainbow, by contrast, look very big and majestic.
If we're close to, say, like the mountains are like
a cell phone tower or something like that, the rainbow
may look very small by comparison.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Yeah, And the way they liken it, and that I
think in that article I think was like the human head,
it's like roughly the same size, but if it was
right in front of your face, it would block out
a whole movie screen. But if it was further away,
it would just be like, hey, there's that guy's head.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
It's the same thing, same thing. And then Phil Plait,
who's who does the Bad Astronomer blog for Slate, he
did a pretty good explanation of full circle rainbows.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yeah, I had never ever heard of that until you
sent me that. So it makes sense though.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
It totally does. So remember we talked about a rainbow
arcing over the sky and because the light is bent
out of the prism.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Well, no, it's because it starts on one part of
the ground and ends on another part of the ground, right.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Where the goal is. The reason why it has that
arc is because what you're seeing is part of what
really is a full circle, and it's depending on where
you are. Now, you have a certain amount of rain
drops available to reflect the light to you.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Right, So when you're on the ground and you're looking
up or just over to the horizon, sure you have
a certain amount of rain drops available to you to
form a rainbow. If you were able to get away
from the ground, you have even more rain drops not
just above you, but now below you as well, and
you can see a full circle. That is the actual
(20:39):
real rainbow. Yeah, so a real rainbow depending on where
you are in relation to the ground is either a
part of a circle, an arc, or a full circle.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, and there was a picture. I mean he said
that pilots see him all the time, or I guess
if you're in astute flyer, that's not just like a
sleep with a black blankets, right, Yeah, you can look
out a window of a plane and see one too,
because you're above it. Right, It's pretty neat. I mean,
there was a photo of one and it was like,
oh wow, there's a full circle rainbow.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Full circle rainbow. It looks it looks kind of like
a lens flare a little bit, but yeah, to a
rainbow lens flair and Phil Plate had in that same
blog post a double circle rainbow, which was really neat.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Yeah, so go check that out. I agree that was
pretty cool. Yeah, you know that thing we were talking
about earlier too, about the perspective. That's why the I
think I thought you did it. Don't be dumb about
why the moon looks bigger? Have you done that?
Speaker 2 (21:41):
No, it's so why can you see the moon during
the day sometimes?
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Oh why is that?
Speaker 2 (21:47):
Well, I'll tell you why.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Because I saw it like a one the other day
that was like super late in the day.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Well, the reason why. A better question is why can't
you see the moon all the time, even during the day.
So it's not the Moon's very bright. It's the brightest
object in the sky, second only to the Sun. Sure,
but it also gets its light from the Sun. So
most of the time when you can't see the Moon
during the day, it's because the moon is behind you, right,
(22:15):
So the light that it's getting from the Sun is
behind you. Now, if the moon is closer to the Sun,
like depending on where the moon is in its lunar phase,
then you can look up and see the Sun and
the Moon at the same time. It's above the horizon.
In other words, Oh okay, so if the moon were
always visible above the horizon, you'd always be able to
(22:35):
see it during the day, gotcha. And it just has
to do with where it is in relation to the
Sun in the lunar phase. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1 (22:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (22:44):
If it's just go watch that, don't be dumb on it.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Yeah, they call that a bonus, an impromptu bonus.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
But the reason why the moon will look really huge
in the sky is because the same thing we're talking
about with the perspective, like the mountain is like when
you're low on the horizon, and it's gonna look enormous.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Right if there's a lot less stuff, Yeah, near close
to you, Yeah, it's gonna look very big.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Yeah. And when I went to Montana years ago. My
explanation I got because you step off the plane and
you think, wow, the sky does look bigger, Like what's
the deal? They call it Big Sky Country, and it
really does look bigger. And the explanation I got from
the locals, which it's because the clouds. So again it's
just a perspective trick.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
So like the mountains are way over there.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
I think it's just the clouds that they typically get
are the big, huge, puffy clouds.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
But they look big in relation to the mountains in
the distance.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Yeah, I think that's the deal. So it makes the
sky appear to look larger.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Plus I imagine also there's fewer obstacles and obstructions, so
that it's just there's more sky to see and take
in just looking around, right.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah. Yeah, Like when I lived in Yuma and you
go out in the desert and you can see like
one hundred and degrees from horizon to horizon, right, But
they don't have the cloud formations, So the sky looks
bigger in Montana than it does like in the middle
of the desert. Yeah, because most of the time in
the desert you're going to see that, you know, just blue,
nothing but blue. Yeah, so there's no perspective nice, you know,
(24:15):
like when you take a picture of something to sell
on eBay, you put your fist next to it so
people know how big it is.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Is that what people do?
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Sure, I've seen quarters and rulers. Never seen a fish.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah, that's quarters and rulers. That's probably a better rule
of thumb.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Yeah right, Yeah, so, Chuck, I got a couple other things. Apparently,
when you look at a rainbow, it's not an even
division or an even representation of all the colors. You
see the most red, it's the most visible. Apparently, thirty
eight percent of a rainbow is red and green is
second at fifteen. Blue is the least with just eleven percent.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
What is green?
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Green is twenty two percent? Okay, twenty two percent of
rainbow green?
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Interesting. I wonder what color blind we need to do
on color blindness. But it's I looked into the article
and it was just sort of started to melt my brain. Yeah,
like all this stuff. So I just said, no, put
that on the back burner.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
I think you did a great job with this.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Well we'll see, I'm sure we'll get stuff wrong.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
And lastly, the LGBT rainbow flag designed in nineteen seventy
eight by a guy named Gilbert Baker. Really and it
used to have eight. It had turquoise and hot pink
on it before. Yeah, but apparently they ran out of
fabric for hot pink because the things like started to
take off, so they discontinued that, and I think the
same went for the turquoise one. Too interesting, we just
(25:42):
went with six.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
And now is it a it's a shining monument for establishments,
for people to say I want to go in there,
and some people to say I don't want to go
in there, sadly, right, you know.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
We went to a gay bar in Philadelphia one afternoon,
and I say, by accident, not like it was a
big deal.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Was it the Blue Oyster?
Speaker 1 (26:07):
No? No, And it was in the afternoon, so that
was just you know, you know how it is in
some bars in the afternoon. Yeah, like the the serious
regulars are in there.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Sure it doesn't matter gay, straight, whatever, and.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
They were very cool guys, and they were like, uh,
and it was a big group of us, and I
think they were like, you know, you know you're in
a gay bar, right, And they were kind of pointing
that out. And I was like, oh, well, great, serve
me a bloody Mary then, right exactly, Like I didn't
know if he thought we were. I think he knew
where from out of town. Sure, so he was just
a letter yeah, yeah, like he didn't want any trouble.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Oh gotcha, you know.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
I was like, we're not like that, my friend.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
That's good.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Just a happy accident.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Does a good ending to the rainbow episode. Yeah. Uh.
If you want to know more about rainbows, go check
out our article on the site rainbows. Just type that
word into how stuff works. Go check out that Slate
and Scientific American in the Atlantic. Some good stuff out there.
And I said search bar. I think in there somewhere,
which means it is time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
That's right. I'm gonna call this Pliny the Beer and
this is from Cory and I think Corey's in San Francisco. Hey, guys,
love the podcast. I was listening to Cinnamon today and
there was an exchange about Pliny and a comment that
there was one and only. I think anyone in the
(27:33):
Bay Area would know that there are two Pliny's, the
Elder and the Younger. That's because one of our local
breweries has a beer called Pliny the Elder, which is
known by beer ficionados as one of the best beers
out there. In fact, it sells out weekly from local groceries.
They also make a Pliny the Younger, which only comes
out for two weeks a year, and people wait in
(27:55):
line for hours just to get a pint. And there
is also a real historical Pliny the Elder and Planty
the Younger, who was his nephew.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
I didn't realize it was his nephew, and.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
That is from Corey. And I did look it up
because the two weeks thing, I did not believe it,
but I just, you know, sometimes you want to see
it with your own eyes, huh. And yeah, Pliny the
Younger is a triple IPA.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Oh well, that sounds awesome.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Named for the nephew and adopted son evidently, and it
is pub draft only. They don't even bottle it, very
limited distribution locally and it's seasonal, so for just two
weeks a year in February at the Bay of Bengal.
You can get it in a bar, I guess in
San Francisco. Nice and it is a ten point twenty
(28:42):
five percenter Wow, Yeah, as opposed to eight for the Elder.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
And they're both IPAs.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Yeah, one's the double and the triple, so that's a
live Yeah, and you can get to planey the Elder
and the bottles. It's not quite as exclusive to try
that on our tour. Yeah, I guess only the Elder
and yes, someone.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Unless we luck out and happen to be there during
that two week period. Huh.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Well, no, it's in February always that what you said.
But if there's a bar out there that maybe wanted
to just say we're out.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Pint, put it under the bar, save it for a
month for us, we'll be there.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
I don't think that's going to happen.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
If you want to correct us after we get something
flagrantly wrong, like we did with the whole plainy thing,
you can tweet to us at sysk podcast. You can
post it on Facebook dot com slash stuff you should know.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
HowStuffWorks dot com, and as always, joined us at our
home on the web, Stuff Youshould Know dot Com. Stuff
(29:44):
you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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