I am easily wowed by sunsets. I think they look really cool. Esepcially when viewed from the right place – coming down North Bend Road, for example. Sunsets have such vivid palletes of color, and they can convey their size without making you feel small in a way that mountains can’t.
Whenever I look at a sunset, my mind starts at work explaining why the sunset looks the way it does – why the color of the sky changes when the sun is lower. This has to do with compton scattering (or, more properly, Raleigh Scattering) which occurs when the light waves crash into the all the molecules that make up our atmosphere. Blue light (~ 550 nm) is at the peak of the sun’s spectrum and also happens to be the lowest energy at which light will be appreciably scattered. As the sun gets lower in the sky, the light has to travel further through the atmosphere, which increases the scattering of lower energy (red, orange, yellow) light waves, resulting in the lovely sunset.
It isn’t just sunsets that I do this with. When anyone tells a joke, I break the joke down in my mind and convert it to an equivalent statement or question. That statement is obviously not funny, but for some reason this analytic process makes the joke more enjoyable for me. Why is it that in order for me to really appreciate the beauty in something, I have to break it down into parts and analyze the manner in which they interact in order to produce the whole? Perhaps it is just part of my nature, or perhaps it’s something I’ve learned to do after years of schooling. In any case, further analysis of the phenomenon under consideration would simply underscore the point, so I’ll call it a day right here.
Edit: Strangely enough, about an hour after I wrote this, we learned the exact same thing in my optics class. It’s one thing to enjoy your learning, it’s quite another to go and find stuff out on your own that you were going to eventually learn in class anyways.