'Why is the sky blue?' and other questions
Parents would rather their children asked them where babies come from than why the sky is blue, a poll suggests today.
The survey reveals many parents dread being asked science-based questions, with nearly one in five (18 per cent) hardly ever talking to their offspring about the subject.
Just a third (32 per cent) regularly talk to their children about how science works, explaining ideas such as why steam comes out of a boiling kettle.
And the poll, which was commissioned by Shell Education Service and hosted on the Mumsnet website, reveals the science questions that leave parents stumped.
Almost one in three (29 per cent) said they would not know how to answer if their child asked "Why is the sky blue?".
Over one in five (21per cent) said they would struggle with "Why does the car work?".
The third most difficult question is "Why can birds fly?" chosen by 15 per cent of parents, followed by "What is water made of?" (ten per cent) and "How do fish breathe?" (nine per cent).
Just one per cent of parents said they would be stumped if asked "Where do babies come from?", the poll found.
For the record, the sky is blue because...
A clear cloudless daytime sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the Sun more than they scatter red light.
This scattering effect is known as Rayleigh scattering. Because the blue light is scattered in random directions, some of it reaches the planet surface, where we see it.
When we look towards the Sun at sunset, we see red and orange colors because the blue light has been scattered out (filtered) and away from our line of sight.
In the evening, the sky sometimes looks orange or red because of air pollution. dust, water vapor, and other floating particles in the air act as a filter on the sunlight.
When the Sun is low, the air layer is thicker and the light is more filtered, so it looks yellow, orange and finally red.
Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
