Author: Peter Pesic

Publisher: MIT Press (MA)

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13:

Children ask, "Why is the sky blue?" but the question also puzzled Plato, Leonardo,and even Newton, who unlocked so many other secrets. The search for an answer continued forcenturies; in 1862 Sir John Herschel listed the color and polarization of sky light as "the twogreat standing enigmas of meteorology." In Sky in a Bottle, Peter Pesic takes us on a quest to theheart of this mystery, tracing the various attempts of science, history, and art to solve it. Hebegins with the scholars of the ancient world and continues through the natural philosophers of theEnlightenment, the empiricists of the scientific revolution, and beyond. The cast of charactersincludes Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Descartes, Euler, Saussure, Goethe, Rayleigh, andEinstein; but the protagonist is the question itself, and the story tells how we have tried toanswer it.Pesic's odyssey introduces us to central ideas of chemistry, optics, and atomic physics.He describes the polarization of light, Rayleigh scattering, and connections between the appearanceof the sky and Avogadro's number. He discusses changing representations of the sky in art, from newstyles of painting to new pigments that created new colors for paint. He considers what the sky'snighttime brightness might tell us about the size and density of the universe. And Pesic asksanother, daring, question: Can we put the sky in a bottle? Can we recreate and understand itsblueness here on earth? This puzzle, he says, opens larger perspectives; questions of the color andbrightness of the sky touch on secrets of matter and light, the scope of the universe in space andtime, the destiny of the earth, and deep human feelings.