the.com/scattering
why the sky is blue and your privacy is doomed by radar.
means The process by which particles or waves are deflected and dispersed in many directions after striking something — or, more loosely, a small, irregular amount spread thinly across an area.
from From the verb "scatter," which surfaces in Middle English as "scateren," likely a variant of "shatter" — the two words share a sense of breaking apart into many pieces and flying off in all directions. The deeper roots are obscure, possibly echoing a Germanic stem for dispersing. The physics sense (light scattering, radar) is a modern borrowing of the everyday word: photons and radio waves, it turns out, scatter much as a handful of seeds flung across a field.
- sky color
- Blue light scatters more than red, painting noon
- named for
- Rayleigh and Mie split the credit by particle size
- nobel fuel
- Compton scattering proved light carries momentum
- sunset trick
- Long light path scatters blue away, leaving red
- radar logic
- Echoes are just waves scattering back to you
compton scattering — photons scattered by electrons, discovered by arthur compton in 1923, demonstrates particle nature of light
rayleigh scattering — light scattered by particles smaller than wavelength, explains why sky is blue
rutherford scattering — alpha particles scattered by gold foil nuclei in 1909, revealed atomic nucleus existence