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Lord Rayleigh: 2 ideas worth knowing

2 ideas from Lord Rayleigh, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• A tiny density mismatch in nitrogen revealed a hidden gas

  Lord Rayleigh noticed that nitrogen extracted from air was consistently heavier than nitrogen made from chemical compounds. Chasing that stubborn discrepancy with chemist William R…

  — Lord Rayleigh & William Ramsay, Argon, a New Constituent of the Atmosphere

• The sky is blue because air scatters short wavelengths of light the most

  Sunlight looks white, but air molecules scatter its blue end far more than its red end — a wavelength-dependent effect worked out by Lord Rayleigh in the 1870s. Look away from the …

  — Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt), On the light from the sky, its polarization and colour

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