| SUNLIGHT AND THE EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE.[1] |
By Professor S. P. LANGLEY.
THERE is, we may remember, a passage in which Plato inquires what would be the thoughts of a man who, having lived from infancy under the roof of a cavern, where the light outside was inferred only by its shadows, was brought for the first time into the full splendors of the sun.
We may have enjoyed the metaphor without thinking that it has any physical application to ourselves, who appear to have no roof over our heads, and to see the sun's face daily; while the fact is, that if we do not see that we have a roof over our heads in our atmosphere, and do not think of it as one, it is because it seems so transparent and colorless.
Now, I wish to ask your attention to-night to considerations in some degree novel, which appear to me to show that it is not transparent as it appears, and that this seeming colorlessness is a sort of delusion of our senses, owing to which we have never in all our lives seen the true color of the sun, which is in reality blue rather than white, as it looks, so that this air all about and above us is acting like a colored glass roof over our heads, or a sort of optical sieve, holding back the excess of blue in the original sunlight, and letting only the white sift down to us.
I will first ask you, then, to consider that this seeming colorlessness of the air may be a delusion of our senses, due to habit, which has never given us anything else to compare it with.
If that cave had been lit by sunshine coming through a reddish glass in its roof, would the perpetual dweller in it ever have had an idea but that the sun was red? How is he to know that the glass is "colored" if he has never in his life anything to compare it with? How can he have any idea but that this is the sum of all the sun's radiations (corresponding to our idea of white or colorless light); will not the habit of his life confirm him in the idea that the sun is red; and will he not think that there is no color in the glass so long as he can not go outside to see? Has this any suggestion for us, who have none of us ever been outside our crystal roof to see?
We must all acknowledge, in the abstract, that habit is equally strong in us, whether we dwell in a cave or under the sky; that what we have thought from infancy will probably appear the sole possible explanation; and that, if we want to break its chain, we should put ourselves, at least in imagination, under conditions where it no longer binds us.
- ↑ A lecture delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Friday evening, April 17, 1885.
